Senior Sales Engineer (Pre-Sales)

What You’ll Do

- Own the technical win across the deal cycle: discovery and qualification with AEs, demo, POV design and execution, technical close.

- Run structured POVs with clear success criteria, mutual action plans, timelines, and exit decisions — for deployments from ten nodes to tens of thousands.

- Deliver demos and whiteboard sessions that land with audiences from hands-on network engineers to CISOs and procurement executives.

- Win competitive deals — articulating where ZeroTier beats WireGuard-based stacks and legacy VPN/SD-WAN vendors, and being honest about where it doesn't.

- Answer RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires , translating NIST, European, and NATO, and post-quantum readiness requirements into concrete architecture answers.

- Architect across our full surface area: hosted Central, self-hosted controllers, flow rules, bridging, multipath, SSO/OIDC, and ZeroTier Quantum's SaaS, sovereign, and air-gapped modes.

- Bridge to Engineering when deals need it — reproduce issues, capture evidence, escalate defects and feature gaps.

- Build the SE machine : demo environments, reference architectures, battle cards, and POV runbooks that make the whole go-to-market team faster.

- Feed the field's voice into the product : structured win/loss insights, deployment patterns, roadmap input.

What We’re Looking For

Pre-sales craft comes first. We can teach ZeroTier internals; we can't teach you how to run a deal.

- 5+ years “customer-facing” in a pre-sales role — Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Solutions Architect attached to a sales team and a quota. You can point to deals you helped win and explain your role in winning them.

- Excellent discovery skills : you ask the second and third question, uncover the real problem, and disqualify gracefully when there isn't a fit.

- Executive presence and range — equally credible whiteboarding Layer 2 internals with a network architect and presenting risk and ROI to a board-level audience.

- POV/pilot management as a discipline: success criteria, mutual action plans, crisp status communication, on-time execution in parallel.

- Excellent written communication — architecture docs, follow-up summaries, and RFP responses that are clear, polished, and technically precise.

- Fluent professional English — with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly with customers across Europe and other parts of the world. Additional languages are a plus.

- A builder's mindset for a ~30+-person company : low ego, high ownership, comfortable with ambiguity.

The technical bar (you'll be tested on this, conversationally):

- Strong networking fundamentals: Layer 2 vs. Layer 3 behavior, routing, NAT and NAT traversal, firewalls, DNS, and overlay/underlay separation.

- Comfort at the packet level — Wireshark/tcpdump is a working tool, not a party trick.

- Solid Linux and real cloud experience (AWS/Azure/GCP): VPCs, routing, security groups, hybrid connectivity.

- Hands-on familiarity with at least two of: SD-WAN, ZTNA, VPN technologies (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN), container networking, or embedded/IoT connectivity.

- Working knowledge of SSO/identity (OIDC, SAML, Entra ID/Okta) as it intersects with network access.

- Scripting fluency (Python, Bash) — enough to automate a demo environment and exercise a REST API. ( Rust exp is nice but not critical)

- The ability to translate all of the above into plain-language business value for a non-cryptographer audience

Nice to have

- Selling into defense, government, or regulated sectors (national Ministries of Defence, NATO, EU institutions, GovCloud, sovereign infrastructure).

- Familiarity with European cybersecurity and regulatory frameworks, such as NIS2, DORA, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and European digital sovereignty requirements.

- Background in OT/industrial environments (Modbus, IEC-61850, SCADA).

- Prior work at an overlay networking, mesh VPN, ZTNA, or SD-WAN vendor.

- Experience as a first or early SE hire — building the function, not just running plays.

- A working grasp of modern cryptography and the quantum threat model — why "harvest now, decrypt later" makes PQC a today problem — and familiarity with the NIST PQC standards (FIPS 203/204/205), hybrid schemes, and the CNSA 2.0 compliance landscape. Most importantly: the ability to translate this into plain-language business value without overselling.

- Familiarity with the NIST post-quantum standards (FIPS 203 / ML-KEM, FIPS 204 / ML-DSA, FIPS 205 / SLH-DSA), hybrid classical + PQC schemes, and crypto-agility as an architectural principle.

- Awareness of the compliance landscape driving adoption: CNSA 2.0, European and NATO cryptographic requirements, and emerging PQC mandates across government and regulated industries.

How we work

You'll report to the Director of Pre-Sales Engineering & Customer Success and partner daily with Sales, Engineering, and Customer Success. Remote-first, with occasional travel for key customer engagements, POV kickoffs, and industry events. We move quickly, write things down, and hold a high bar for what we put in front of customers.

Important: This is a hybrid role based in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with three days per week in our office at Utrecht Central Station and two days working from home.

Benfits

Benefits

- Competitive salary

- Hybrid work environment: we work 3 days at our office at Utrecht Central Station and 2 days from home

- Equity compensation package

- Retirement savings plan with employer contribution

- 25 holiday days of PTO per year

- Flexible work hours (subject to management approval)

- Career Enhancement Funds plus Employee Referral Bonus