Senior Sales Engineer is a
pre-sales customer facing,quota-adjacent role on the Sales team. You'll spend your days in discovery calls, demos, POVs, and deal strategy - not in a NOC nor writing production code but will also participate in post sales technical escalation support on occasion as well as collaboration with customer success and customer onboarding requests.
"This is not a software or network architect role." Pre-sales Engineering experience is required.
The RoleYou are the technical counterpart to our Account Executives and the trusted advisor to buyers - from a founder connecting a fleet of Raspberry Pis, to an industrial OT team bridging PLCs across plants, to a defense integrator architecting an air-gapped, CNSA 2.0-compliant sovereign network. You own the technical win: discovery, solution architecture, demos, and proof-of-value engagements end to end, then hand off cleanly to Customer Success.
What You'll Do- Own the technical win across the deal cycle: discovery and qualification with AEs, demo, POV design and execution, technical close.
- Run structured POVs with clear success criteria, mutual action plans, timelines, and exit decisions - for deployments from ten nodes to tens of thousands.
- Deliver demos and whiteboard sessions that land with audiences from hands-on network engineers to CISOs and procurement executives.
- Win competitive deals - articulating where ZeroTier beats Tailscale, WireGuard-based stacks, and legacy VPN/SD-WAN vendors, and being honest about where it doesn't.
- Answer RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires, translating FIPS, CNSA 2.0, and post-quantum readiness requirements into concrete architecture answers.
- Architect across our full surface area: hosted Central, self-hosted controllers, flow rules, bridging, multipath, SSO/OIDC, and ZeroTier Quantum's SaaS, sovereign, and air-gapped modes.
- Bridge to Engineering when deals need it - reproduce issues, capture evidence, escalate defects and feature gaps.
- Build the SE machine: demo environments, reference architectures, battle cards, and POV runbooks that make the whole go-to-market team faster.
- Feed the field's voice into the product: structured win/loss insights, deployment patterns, roadmap input.
What We're Looking ForPre-sales craft comes first. We can teach ZeroTier internals; we can't teach you how to run a deal.- 4+ years "customer-facing" in a pre-sales role - Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Solutions Architect attached to a sales team and a quota. You can point to deals you helped win and explain your role in winning them.
- Elite discovery skills: you ask the second and third question, uncover the real problem, and disqualify gracefully when there isn't a fit.
- Executive presence and range - equally credible whiteboarding Layer 2 internals with a network architect and presenting risk and ROI to a board-level audience.
- POV/pilot management as a discipline: success criteria, mutual action plans, crisp status communication, on-time execution in parallel.
- Excellent written communication - architecture docs, follow-up summaries, and RFP responses that are clear, polished, and technically precise.
- A builder's mindset for a ~30+-person company: low ego, high ownership, comfortable with ambiguity.
The technical bar (you'll be tested on this, conversationally):- Strong networking fundamentals: Layer 2 vs. Layer 3 behavior, routing, NAT and NAT traversal, firewalls, DNS, and overlay/underlay separation.
- Comfort at the packet level - Wireshark/tcpdump is a working tool, not a party trick.
- Solid Linux and real cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP): VPCs, routing, security groups, hybrid connectivity.
- Hands-on familiarity with at least two of: SD-WAN, ZTNA, VPN technologies (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN), container networking, or embedded/IoT connectivity.
- Working knowledge of SSO/identity (OIDC, SAML, Entra ID/Okta) as it intersects with network access.
- Scripting fluency (Python, Bash) - enough to automate a demo environment and exercise a REST API.
- The ability to translate all of the above into plain-language business value for a non-cryptographer audiences
Nice to have- Selling into defense, government, or regulated sectors (DOD, GovCloud, sovereign infrastructure).
- Background in OT/industrial environments (Modbus, IEC-61850, SCADA).
- Prior work at an overlay networking, mesh VPN, ZTNA, or SD-WAN vendor.
- Experience as a first or early SE hire - building the function, not just running plays.
- A working grasp of modern cryptography and the quantum threat model - why "harvest now, decrypt later" makes PQC a today problem - and familiarity with the NIST PQC standards (FIPS 203/204/205), hybrid schemes, and the CNSA 2.0 compliance landscape. Most importantly: the ability to translate this into plain-language business value without overselling.
- Familiarity with the NIST post-quantum standards (FIPS 203 / ML-KEM, FIPS 204 / ML-DSA, FIPS 205 / SLH-DSA), hybrid classical + PQC schemes, and crypto-agility as an architectural principle.
- Awareness of the compliance landscape driving adoption: CNSA 2.0 timelines, FIPS 140-3 validation, and PQC mandates emerging across government and regulated industries.
How we workYou'll report to the Director of Pre-Sales Engineering & Customer Success and partner daily with Sales, Engineering, and Customer Success. Remote-first with occasional travel for key customer engagements, POV kickoffs, and industry events. We move quickly, write things down, and hold a high bar for what we put in front of customers.
Benefits- Competitive salary + variable compensation tied to team success and available equity
- Hybrid office / remote work environment
- Generous employer-paid health insurance, including preventative dental
- 401K with employer matching
- Flexible PTO and flexible work hours
- Career enhancement funds
