Location: Bay Area/ San Jose, CA - remote, field-based.
The RoleKai is hiring a
Senior Solutions Engineer to cover strategic accounts in the Bay Area and Western region. This is a remote, field-based role in the Bay Area with expectations to visit and work out of our San Jose or San Francisco HQ when not in the field.
You will own the technical sales motion in your territory - from first call through POV close - partnering directly with your regional Account Executive to bring Kai's platform to the largest enterprises in the Bay Area market.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership role. You are the technical authority in every room, and your ability to connect deep security expertise to measurable business outcomes will determine what closes and what doesn't. There is no deployment team behind you yet - you will personally run technical discovery, build the POV, and troubleshoot the integration work yourself.
We are building the SE function as we grow. The person who joins now will have direct influence on how that function operates - not just how it executes.
What You'll Do- Own the full pre-sales technical motion for enterprise opportunities in the Bay Area, partnering closely with your Account Executive from first call through signed agreement
- Design, run, and personally execute structured, outcome-driven POVs - including hands-on integration work (API connections, firewall rules, troubleshooting live data feeds) since there is no separate deployment engineering team at this stage
- Lead deep technical discovery to understand each customer's environment, threat model, and existing security stack before you ever open a demo
- Deliver compelling presentations and demonstrations to technical and executive audiences - security architects, SOC leadership, and CISOs - translating platform capabilities into business outcomes
- Build trusted advisor relationships with security teams at Global 2000 and Fortune 500 accounts
- Represent Kai at industry events, security conferences, and customer briefings across the US
- Bring field intelligence back to Product and Engineering - you are the voice of the customer inside the company
What You'll BringRequired:- 7+ years of Enterprise Security experience in a solutions engineering, systems engineering, or pre-sales role
- Broad enterprise security knowledge, with credible working fluency across the tools our customers actually run: vulnerability management (Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7), cloud/CNAPP (Wiz, Prisma Cloud), EDR (CrowdStrike, Microsoft Defender), SIEM (Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel), and CMDB/ITSM (ServiceNow) - you know how to map a platform to a customer's real stack, not just their org chart
- Hands-on AppSec fluency: SCA/SAST tooling, CI/CD pipeline integration, and the ability to speak credibly about vulnerability reachability and exploitability, not just infrastructure vulnerability management
- Comfort explaining and defending an AI-native, agentic architecture to skeptical technical buyers - model-neutral design, autonomous remediation trust models, why "read-only until explicitly enabled" matters, and how agent-based analysis differs from static rules or scripts
- Proven track record running structured, outcome-driven POVs with Global 2000 or Fortune 500 accounts
- Experience selling into accounts with 10,000+ employees
- Strong discovery skills grounded in real vulnerability management vocabulary (CVSS, EPSS, KEV, compensating controls) - you ask the right questions before you ever open a demo
- Ability to connect technical outcomes to business value
- Deep, long-tenured experience covering the Bay Area, with established relationships within your territory
- Startup experience bringing brand new category-defining technology into the market
- Experience at a security platform company - you've sold a connected system, not a point solution
- Willingness to travel up to 50%+
Preferred:- Background in detection and response, vulnerability management, exposure management, application security, security operations, or asset intelligence
- Experience working within a formal enterprise sales methodology - MEDDICC/MEDDPICC, Force Management, Challenger, or similar
- Comfortable pitching and enabling through channel/reseller partners (e.g., WWT, GuidePoint, Optiv-type partners) - useful now, since Kai leans on partner-sourced pipeline while the direct team is still small
- Prior involvement in building or refining a POV framework or SE playbook
