Solutions Engineer recruitment

Two signals usually appear together: deals are stalling at technical validation, and engineers or founders are being pulled into customer calls often enough to affect the roadmap.

The first SE hire is also a structural decision. That person will define how demos are run, what a proof of concept looks like and where the line sits between pre-sales and support — so they need to be capable of building the function, not only working inside one.

A first SE at Series A works across the whole funnel: demos, proofs of concept, security questionnaires, documentation, sometimes onboarding. Breadth and self-direction matter more than specialisation.

By Series C the function is segmented, there is enablement and a demo environment, and the value shifts to depth in a specific vertical or technical domain.

We do not run a coding test. The screen is a live technical explanation: the candidate takes a real product or architecture and explains it to a technical audience, then to a commercial one, and is pushed on the boundaries of what they know.

Candidates who overstate depth are visible quickly. So are candidates who are technically strong but cannot resist answering a business question with an implementation detail.

For AI companies pre-sales carries additional weight: benchmarking, evaluation design, data governance questions and bespoke proofs of concept. We recruit across AI infrastructure, applications and agentic products, so the screen reflects how those evaluations actually run.