The role

We're hiring a pre-sales engineer for North America to own the technical side of every sales cycle in the region.

You own the technical validation that happens before a deal is signed: discovery, a time-boxed proof of concept with success criteria agreed up front, benchmarks run on the customer's own data that their engineers can reproduce, architecture sign-off and security review, through to the first production workload. You are the engineer in the room when a bank's platform team asks how replication and failover actually work, or when an aerospace team needs rocket telemetry streamed and queried in real time. Most evaluations are for new projects at firms that already run incumbent systems, so much of the work is making the case credible against what they know: the architecture, the numbers, and a plan their engineers believe they can execute.

You work closely with our CEO, who is on the ground in New York, and with the sales team on every deal. You also work directly with our CTO and core engineers on the product, so what you learn in the field goes straight into the roadmap. This is a hands-on individual-contributor role with a lot of customer time and a lot of autonomy.

Responsibilities

• Run technical discovery with engineers, architects and quants: what data they have, how much of it, how fast it needs to move, and what it runs on today.
• Design and run proofs of concept with written success criteria and a timeline: build the ingestion path, load representative data, design the schema, write the queries, and measure the results.
• Own deployment and architecture conversations: sizing, replication and high availability, backup and recovery, BYOC on AWS and Azure, Kubernetes, RBAC, TLS and SSO, storage tiering and Parquet queries.
• Deliver demos and technical deep dives that fit the audience, from a two-person quant team to a bank's architecture review board.
• Position QuestDB against the incumbent time-series databases with precision: where we win, where we do not, and what a migration really involves.
• Answer security questionnaires, RFIs and RFPs, and run vendor due-diligence sessions with customer security and infrastructure teams.
• Hand every closed deal over cleanly: what was built, how it is configured, what was promised, and what is still open, so support and engineering can run it from day one.
• Turn field work into reusable assets: reference architectures, benchmark reports, migration guides, sample pipelines and demo datasets.
• Feed product gaps and customer requests back to the CTO and core engineering with the evidence attached.
• Represent QuestDB at meetups, conferences and customer events in New York, Chicago and Toronto.

Requirements

• Has run or supported technical evaluations with enterprise buyers, and knows how to define success criteria and hold a proof of concept to them.
• Experience in a hands-on role with databases, streaming or data infrastructure, as a pre-sales engineer, solutions engineer, data engineer or software engineer.
• Based in New York City, or on the US East Coast and able to be with customers in New York regularly.
• Strong SQL and a solid understanding of database internals: storage layout, partitioning, indexing, query planning, and why columnar storage and vectorized execution matter for time series.
• A precise communicator: explains trade-offs to a sceptical engineer, writes clearly, and says "I will check" rather than guessing.
• At ease in front of customers, in person and on calls, and able to run a technical session alone.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with columnar analytical databases.
• Capital-markets data experience: tick data, order books, market-data feed handlers, backtesting or risk systems.
• Comfortable with Linux, Docker, Kubernetes and a major cloud (AWS or Azure).
• Writes working code in Python and one of Java, C++, Rust or Go.
• The Python data stack (pandas, Polars, Arrow, Parquet) and Grafana.
• Technical writing.

What we offer

• Generous equity options package
• Flexible working hours
• Freedom of choice for your technical equipment
• Wonderful, highly qualified colleagues
• Truly international: more than 10 different nationalities
• A transparent, collaborative and inclusive culture
• Exciting opportunities for career progression as we grow
• High autonomy and trust, with minimal bureaucracy and a collaborative environment

How to apply

In your application, include a short note on why this role, and one evaluation or migration you ran that you are proud of, including what you would do differently now.