Dir, Solutions Engineering (Central/West)
Required skills
- infrastructure software
- cloud-native technologies
- agentic infrastructure
- service mesh
- API gateways
- L4/L7 networking
- mTLS
- zero-trust security
- enterprise platform engineering
- infrastructure teams
Nice to have
- Gateway API
- Cilium/eBPF
- AI/LLM workloads
- agent infrastructure
- model gateways
- MCP/A2A
Role summary
Solo.io is seeking a Director, Solutions Engineering, a player-coach leader responsible for technical wins in the Central and West regions. This role involves leading a team of Solutions Engineers, partnering with sales leadership, and staying hands-on with architecture sessions and POCs for complex opportunities. The ideal candidate has 8+ years in technical pre-sales for infrastructure software, including 3+ years managing SEs, with deep expertise in cloud-native technologies like Kubernetes, service mesh, and API gateways. Experience in open source sales motions and fluency in sales methodologies are crucial. The role requires strong communication skills and the ability to engage with both engineers and executives.
Who we are.
Solo.io is reimagining infrastructure for cloud and AI. We unite secure, seamless cloud connectivity with AI-ready, agentic infrastructure, and leading enterprises worldwide trust us to securely connect their applications, services, and AI workloads across any environment.
Joining Solo means working at the center of how enterprises adopt AI: on open source projects built in the open with a global community, alongside the people who created them, for customers who are among the largest in the world. If you want to help organizations accelerate innovation, scale intelligently, and put modern AI agents to work, we’d love to meet you. Learn more at www.solo.io.
About the role.
The Director, Solutions Engineering is a player-coach leadership role responsible for winning the technical evaluation in every deal across our Central and West regions. You will lead a team of Solutions Engineers directly, partnering with regional sales leadership to turn open source adoption of Istio, kgateway, agentgateway and kagent into enterprise customers. You will manage and develop the team, build the repeatable processes that make them consistent, and stay hands-on enough to lead architecture sessions and POCs on our most complex opportunities yourself. Our buyers are platform engineering, security and architecture teams at some of the largest companies in the world, and our deals are won on technical credibility.
Job Description:
Job Requirements:
What you'll love about Solo.
At Solo, our culture is all about hiring great people, creating a fun and fast-paced work culture, and letting our teams work with our customers to successfully solve their challenges.
Solo works collaboratively with our customers, partners and open source communities to deliver technology innovation, technology solutions, architectural best-practices, and hands-on education. Solo uses a unique engagement model with our customers that allows us to quickly make them successful, and continue to work closely with them as their production environments grow.
Solo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.
The company may use AI tools to help sort applicants based on job related criteria. However, the hiring team decides who moves forward and no employment decisions are made by AI.
