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.

Hire GTM talent

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.

100+
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.

The offer

A free 30-minute presales hiring diagnosis with the founder — then your ideal candidates within 10 days. You only pay if you hire.

I built and scaled these teams myself. I made the hiring mistakes — that’s why I started Tipped.

Ash Takher, founder of Tipped Recruitment

Ash Takher

Founder (former SaaS Sales Leader) · runs searches personally

  • Optimizely — European Sales Leader
  • Sensor Tower — VP EMEA
  • ByteDance · AI Lab — Led Western EMEA

Not a recruiter who found sales. An operator who built and scaled the teams you are hiring for.

What you get in the presales hiring diagnosis

Free · no brief needed

  1. 01Technical validation evidence

    The proof-of-concept, discovery and technical win record a shortlist must demonstrate — not demo theatre.

  2. 02Demo and discovery competencies

    The live behaviours that separate a credible technical partner from a presenter reading a script.

  3. 03Team design

    SE-to-AE ratio, specialisation and when to hire the first dedicated presales seat at your stage.

  4. 04Compensation benchmark

    Base, variable and club eligibility against live US and EMEA comparators — so the offer lands first time.

Then, if it makes sense

You get your ideal candidates within 10 days

  • Full CVs and candidate profiles you can share with your team
  • A written assessment of each candidate against the agreed scorecard

How you pay

Only if you hire

No retainer on the diagnosis, and nothing owed unless you hire the person we introduce.

Book with me here

Meet Ash within 48 hours.

Prefer email? hello@tippedrecruitment.com

Case study

Five placements in five months for 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

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

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.

Book a call

Prefer email? hello@tippedrecruitment.com