Pre-Sales
Pre-Sales recruitment: Solutions Engineers and Solutions Consultants
Great pre-sales talent carries technical depth and commercial weight at the same time. Which is why it is not technical support for the sales team.
Search for the technical half of the sales conversation — the people who make a complex product credible in front of a buyer's engineers.
The balance changes. Neither skill disappears.
Select a stage — a hiring framework, not a measurement
Technical depth
Meaningful
Commercial weight
Very high
Commercially led, technically credible
The pre-sales hire is listening for architecture, data and integration constraints while the seller runs the commercial frame. Questions, not demos — but the questions have to land with engineers.
- 300+
- GTM placements, including pre-sales first hires and team builds
- US + EMEA
- Solutions engineering and solutions consulting search in both regions
- 10 working days
- Average to identify the ideal candidate for a search
Pre-sales is where technical products are won or lost. The seller opens the conversation; the pre-sales hire is the person the buyer's engineering team decides whether to trust.
Tipped runs pre-sales search for venture-backed SaaS and AI companies — first hires who define the function, and small teams built out behind a growing sales organisation.
Why this function is harder to hire
The pool is genuinely narrow. You are looking for someone technical enough to be credible in an architecture review and commercial enough to hold a deal timeline in their head, and the two skills rarely arrive in equal measure.
Most failed pre-sales hires are not technically weak. They were hired for depth and then asked to operate as a second seller, or hired for polish and then asked to debug an integration in front of the customer. Establishing which of those the role actually is takes place at intake, before any candidate is approached.
AI products have raised the bar
Evaluation cycles for AI products involve benchmarking, data handling, security review and often a bespoke proof of concept. That pushes work that used to sit with engineering into pre-sales.
We recruit across AI infrastructure, AI applications and agentic products, so the technical screen reflects how those products are actually evaluated rather than a generic demo competency.
Where to go next
- Solutions Engineer recruitment
- Deeper technical validation, proof of concept and integration work alongside the AE.
- Solutions Consultant recruitment
- Business-process and configuration weight, with technical depth varying by organisation.
- Sales recruitment
- The Account Executives the pre-sales function partners with day to day.
Proof
Unitary AI
Five placements in five months for Unitary AI while its commercial functions were being established.
Read the case study- 5
- Placements
- 5 months
- Elapsed across the programme
Selected clients
- Cursor
- Planhat
- Branch
- Unitary AI
- Sweep
- Anima Health
- FullStory
- Acoustic
- Optimizely
- VertoFX
Common questions
- When should a company make its first pre-sales hire?
- Usually at the point where the founder or a senior engineer is being pulled into demos and technical evaluations often enough to slow product work down, and where sellers are losing deals at the technical validation stage rather than on commercials.
- Do you place pre-sales leadership as well as individual contributors?
- Yes. Individual-contributor pre-sales hires run through this practice; Director+ pre-sales and wider GTM leadership appointments run through our Leadership Search practice.
Related expertise
Solutions Engineer recruitment
Technical validation and proof-of-concept ownership.
Solutions Consultant recruitment
Process, configuration and business-value framing.
Sales recruitment
The sellers pre-sales works alongside.
AI recruitment
Commercial hiring for AI companies.
SaaS recruitment
B2B SaaS GTM hiring.
Ready to talk about the hire?
Tell us the roles, the markets and the stage. You will get a straight answer on whether we are the right partner, and a market view either way.