Dir, Solutions Engineering (Central/West)

About the role

Who we are.

Solo.io is reimagining infrastructure for cloud and AI. We unite secure, seamless cloud connectivity with AI-ready, agentic infrastructure, and leading enterprises worldwide trust us to securely connect their applications, services, and AI workloads across any environment.

Joining Solo means working at the center of how enterprises adopt AI: on open source projects built in the open with a global community, alongside the people who created them, for customers who are among the largest in the world. If you want to help organizations accelerate innovation, scale intelligently, and put modern AI agents to work, we'd love to meet you.

About the role.

The Director, Solutions Engineering is a player-coach leadership role responsible for winning the technical evaluation in every deal across our Central and West regions. You will lead a team of Solutions Engineers directly, partnering with regional sales leadership to turn open source adoption of Istio, kgateway, agentgateway and kagent into enterprise customers.

You will manage and develop the team, build the repeatable processes that make them consistent, and stay hands-on enough to lead architecture sessions and POCs on our most complex opportunities yourself. Our buyers are platform engineering, security and architecture teams at some of the largest companies in the world, and our deals are won on technical credibility.

About the role

• Lead and develop a team of Solutions Engineers across the Central and West regions, setting a high technical bar and coaching on discovery, demos, POC strategy, and executive communication.
• Act as technical executive sponsor on the region's largest and most complex opportunities, leading architecture sessions, design reviews, and objection handling yourself when the deal requires it.
• Own the technical win in region: decide which deals to go deep on and which to qualify out, and set clear POC success criteria with customers before work begins.
• Partner with regional sales leadership on account strategy, SE coverage, deal reviews, and forecast accuracy.
• Build repeatable assets such as discovery frameworks, reference architectures, demo environments, and POC playbooks.
• Position Solo against open source DIY, hyperscaler offerings, and other agnetic infrastructure, API gateway, and service mesh vendors in competitive evaluations.
• Act as the voice of the field, bringing structured customer and competitive feedback to the product management, engineering, and marketing teams.
• Represent Solo in the community through customer workshops, meetups, industry events, and technical content creation.

Job Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in technical pre-sales (Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, or Field Engineer) for infrastructure software, including 3+ years directly managing SEs.
• Proven record of hiring and developing SEs and measurably improving technical win rate or POC conversion.
• Deep, hands-on expertise in cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes, agentic infrastructure, service mesh (such as Istio), and API gateways (such as Envoy), along with L4/L7 networking, mTLS, and zero-trust security.
• Experience selling to enterprise platform engineering, infrastructure, and security teams on complex, multi-stakeholder deals.
• Experience in an open source or open-core sales motion, converting community users into enterprise customers.
• Fluency in a formal sales methodology (MEDDPICC, Command of the Message, or similar) and the ability to coach a team to use it.
• Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to engage both principal engineers and executive buyers.
• Located in the Central or West US, with willingness to travel to customers and events in region.
• Experience with Gateway API, Cilium/eBPF, or another API gateway or service mesh product is a plus.
• Working knowledge of AI/LLM workloads or agent infrastructure (model gateways, MCP/A2A, agent access governance) is a plus.
• Background at a CNCF-ecosystem or open-core infrastructure company, or experience in regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, telco), is a plus.
• A bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• What you'll love about Solo.
• At Solo, our culture is all about hiring great people, creating a fun and fast-paced work culture, and letting our teams work with our customers to successfully solve their challenges.

Solo works collaboratively with our customers, partners and open source communities to deliver technology innovation, technology solutions, architectural best-practices, and hands-on education. Solo uses a unique engagement model with our customers that allows us to quickly make them successful, and continue to work closely with them as their production environments grow.

The company may use AI tools to help sort applicants based on job related criteria. However, the hiring team decides who moves forward and no employment decisions are made by AI.