About the RoleRender is hiring a Solutions Engineer to own the technical side of our pre-sales motion. This is a foundational role on the go-to-market team, joining at a pivotal moment: Heroku has transitioned to maintenance-focused support, and a large cohort of developers and engineering teams is looking for a modern home. You'll be the technical force behind how we win that business-and new business more broadly-serving as the credible, hands-on engineer that prospects need to see before they make an infrastructure decision.
You'll work closely with Account Executives across the full sales cycle: leading discovery, architecting solutions, running proof-of-concepts, and guiding migrations. You'll be equally comfortable pairing with a senior engineer on a complex Heroku migration and presenting a platform overview to a VP of Engineering. This role reports to the Head of Technical Sales.
What You'll Do- Lead technical discovery with prospects-uncovering infrastructure requirements, architecture constraints, scale targets, and migration complexity to build a clear path to Render
- Deliver customized product demonstrations that map Render's capabilities directly to each prospect's use case, including persistent compute, autoscaling, Postgres, background workers, cron jobs, preview environments, and Blueprints
- Architect and run proof-of-concept deployments that prove Render can handle real production workloads-LLM-powered applications, multi-service stacks, async pipelines, and beyond
- Serve as the go-to technical expert for prospects migrating from Heroku, including teams with complex multi-dyno architectures, large Postgres databases, and third-party add-on dependencies
- Develop and maintain migration playbooks, demo environments, and POC templates that reduce time-to-value for prospects and enable the broader team to move faster
- Handle technical objections and competitive comparisons-including against AWS, GCP, Railway, and Fly.io-with honest, well-reasoned arguments that build trust
- Respond to technical sections of RFPs and security questionnaires with accuracy and speed
- Collaborate with Account Executives to build multi-stakeholder consensus across engineering, DevOps, and infrastructure decision-makers
- Synthesize field feedback into structured product input for Engineering and Product, helping prioritize the roadmap based on what's winning and losing deals
- Contribute to technical marketing content-migration guides, blog posts, webinars-that builds Render's credibility with developer audiences
What We're Looking For- Has 8+ years of experience in a pre-sales, solutions engineering, or technical sales role at a cloud infrastructure, PaaS, or developer tools company
- Has deep, hands-on familiarity with at least one major PaaS platform (Heroku, Render, Railway, Fly.io, or similar)-you've deployed real applications, not just read the docs
- Is proficient across the modern web application stack: web servers, background workers, databases (Postgres especially), caching layers, CI/CD pipelines, and container-based deployments
- Can write code-Python, Ruby, Node.js, Go, or similar-well enough to debug a customer's failing deploy, adapt a code sample, or build a POC integration
- Understands networking fundamentals-private networking, egress control, TLS, custom domains-which are common friction points in migration evaluations
- Is an excellent communicator: equally comfortable presenting to a VP of Engineering and pairing with a developer on a tricky migration issue
- Has a track record of managing multiple simultaneous technical evaluations without sacrificing quality or responsiveness
- Thrives in a fast-moving, early-stage environment and is excited to help shape process as a foundational member of the team
Nice-to-Haves- Direct experience migrating production workloads from Heroku to any alternative platform
- Familiarity with Render's product suite-Blueprints (render.yaml), Preview Environments, private services, and managed Postgres
- Experience with AI/ML workloads: LLM inference endpoints, GPU compute, vector databases, or model serving-a fast-growing and strategically important segment of Render's customer base
- Background in technical content creation: migration guides, architecture blog posts, YouTube tutorials, or conference talks
- Exposure to IaC tools (Terraform, Pulumi) and how they interact with PaaS abstractions
- Experience in a quota-carrying or quota-influenced pre-sales role at a high-velocity startup
If this role excites you but you don't meet every single requirement, we'd still love to hear from you-your unique experience might be just what we need.
Benefits- 4 weeks of paid vacation.
- 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all parents to bond with a newly born, adopted, or fostered child. We will also work with you to create a supportive plan of return.
- Long-term disability, life insurance, and 401K plans.
- 100% employer-paid medical coverage and 99% employer-paid dental and vision coverage for you and a dependent. FSAs and HSAs are available as well.
- Monthly lifestyle stipend for wellness, mental health and therapy, hobbies, etc.
- Monthly cell phone and internet subsidy.
- Commuter benefits for Renders in the Bay Area, and home office stipends for remote Renders.
- Continuous learning benefits & related support.
This position is generally not eligible for new visasponsorship. At Render's discretion, the business may sponsor existing visa transfers. Applicants who require sponsorship must receive business authorization.