Senior Director, Sales Engineering - Majors

As the Senior Systems Engineering Director (Senior SED) for Majors, you will lead the pre-sales engineering organization across our highest-revenue majors accounts. You are a second-line leader responsible for managing first-line Systems Engineering Directors (SEDs), Principal Architects, and senior Individual Contributors.

Partnering directly with Area Vice Presidents (AVPs) of Sales, you will own technical go-to-market execution, capacity planning, and technical win rates across the region. You will move the team beyond reactive technical demonstrations and open-ended POCs into a disciplined engineering motion: validating deals against clear C-level business metrics, generating technical pipeline, and scaling practical AI workflows across the field.

• Partner with Regional Sales VPs on quarterly territory reviews, account tiering, and technical coverage planning.
• Balance and govern SE team capacity across accounts, setting clear criteria to allocate engineering resources where win probability and deal value are highest.
• Manage second-line operational metrics: technical win rates, POV cycle times, and resource utilization across the region.

• Enforce clear entry and exit criteria for all customer evaluations, requiring documented executive business goals and CISO/CIO alignment before committing technical resources.
• Hold SE Directors and Managers accountable for operational rigor: tracking 30-day technical validation milestones, maintaining shared customer war rooms, and preventing scope creep.
• Act as executive technical sponsor on flagship deals, partnering with account teams during late-stage negotiations and high-stakes executive playbacks.

• Drive a culture of technical pipeline generation, leading teams to proactively uncover new expansion opportunities through architectural reviews, zero trust maturity workshops, and executive threat briefings.
• Partner with Customer Success and Professional Services to identify expansion paths within existing Major accounts and protect renewal health.

• Hire, develop, and retain high-performing SE Directors, SE Managers, Principal Architects, and Senior SEs.
• Drive structured performance management, succession planning, and leadership development across your management layer.
• Foster a high-accountability, collaborative engineering culture aligned with our core values: Communicate. Collaborate. Continuously Improve.

• Run regular field retrospectives to synthesize product gaps, competitive threats, and integration bottlenecks encountered during POVs.
• Deliver structured, data-backed telemetry to Product Management and Engineering leadership to prioritize roadmap decisions that directly unblock revenue.

• Drive adoption of modern AI tooling across your organization—equipping SEs to use LLMs and automation for faster RFP responses, lab automation, discovery synthesis, and solution modeling.

• Operational Rigor: You build systems, cadences, and standards so that technical execution is consistent across all teams rather than dependent on individual heroics.
• Executive Presence: You speak fluently with CISOs, CIOs, and Enterprise Architects, translating technical capabilities into business risk reduction and ROI.
• Collaborative Leadership: You forge tight partnerships with Sales, Product Engineering, Channels, and Post-Sales services to drive seamless customer lifecycle management.
• Decisiveness: You know when to qualify out of bad deals and pull resources from stalled evaluations to protect team focus and deal velocity.

• 12+ years of technical pre-sales engineering experience in enterprise software, cybersecurity, cloud architecture, or networking infrastructure.
• 5+ years in a formal leadership capacity, with demonstrated experience managing managers (second-line leadership) or leading large, distributed field engineering organizations ($100M+ ARR scope).
• Demonstrated curiosity and active exploration of AI tools, with a proven history of integrating new technologies to enhance daily workflows and augment problem-solving
• Proven track record partnering with Senior Sales Leadership (RVPs/AVPs) on quota attainment, capacity forecasting, and complex MEDDPICC-governed sales motions.
• Deep knowledge of Zero Trust principles, SASE/SSE architectures, cloud security, and enterprise networking.

• Prior experience establishing or overhauling POV governance frameworks, reducing evaluation cycle times, and improving technical win rates.
• Demonstrate strong AI fluency by leveraging coding assistants, LLMs, and Generative AI tools to accelerate troubleshooting, solution design, automation, and customer problem-solving, while applying sound technical judgment to validate outputs.
• Direct experience engaging with Fortune 500 / Global 2000 C-level security and IT executives.
• Track record of incorporating modern AI-assisted engineering tools and automation into pre-sales workflows.
• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent enterprise experience.