Manager, Sales Engineering

Description

The company helps developers and security teams ship faster by removing security busywork. Thousands of organizations use its product to find, audit, and manage open source code safely. Customers include Anthropic, xAI, Figma, and Vercel.

The company was founded by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a long-time open source maintainer whose software is downloaded over a billion times a month. It has raised $125M from angels, operators, and security leaders.

The company is hiring a Manager, Sales Engineering to lead the team that helps security and engineering buyers understand the product, confirm its value, and choose it.

Buyers are technical and want clear answers, convincing demonstrations, and evaluations based on their own workflows rather than generic pitches. You will coach Sales Engineers to tie software supply chain security to each customer's priorities, work closely with Sales leadership, and build a repeatable technical sales process that does not depend on a few people saving every deal.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You will hire and develop strong SEs, improve discovery and proof-of-concept execution, and join strategic customer conversations when your experience can change the result. Success means your team becomes stronger and more self-reliant, not that you are needed in every difficult deal.

Responsibilities

• Lead, coach, and grow a regional SE team. Use the company's existing hiring, onboarding, development, and performance management practices, and help drive adoption of its framework and standards. Run interview loops and work to close strong candidates against the current hiring bar.
• Work with Sales leaders and AEs on deal strategy, qualification, coverage, and priorities. Help the team win the technical evaluation while Sales owns the commercial close.
• Put a consistent evaluation process in place covering agreed success criteria, customer owners, timelines, technical risk tracking, and documented outcomes.
• Review strategic deals and stalled evaluations. Find the real blocker, coach the SE, and escalate product or implementation gaps with clear context.
• Stay technical enough to support demos, integrations, and complex customer conversations. Turn what works into reusable demos, playbooks, and onboarding material.
• Represent the field to Product and Engineering, and work with TAMs and Customer Success to make handoffs from pre-sales to post-sales clean.
• Track and report on technical win rate, POC durations, POC starts, and quota attainment. Identify what is not working and build informed plans to improve it.

Requirements

• At least 7 years as a Sales or Solutions Engineer, including at least 2 years directly managing SEs, with hiring and ramping experience.
• You have led technical sales to commercial or enterprise customers, from discovery through demos, POCs, and technical validation, selling to developers and security teams.
• You have improved team performance through specific coaching and operating changes, not by taking over difficult deals.
• You can hold a technical conversation about CI/CD, package managers, the open source ecosystem, and how developers work. You are comfortable with Linux and scripting in Python or JavaScript.
• You have built or meaningfully improved pre-sales systems such as evaluation frameworks, coverage models, demo standards, or onboarding.
• You have managed through growth at a startup where processes and resources were still changing.
• You work well with Sales leadership. You prioritize their support, challenge weak qualification constructively, and keep technical validation separate from close probability.
• You communicate clearly with practitioners, CISOs, engineering leaders, and executives.
• You are willing to travel up to 25%.
• Nice to have: experience in software supply chain security, AppSec, DevSecOps, or SCA.
• Nice to have: experience managing SEs across more than one segment.
• Nice to have: practical use of automation and AI tools to raise SE productivity, with sound judgment about accuracy and customer data.

Conditions

Regional role. Travel of up to 25% is part of the job.