Director of Sales Engineering

THE ROLE 

Kai is hiring a Director of Sales Engineering to lead our sales engineering team across North America. This is a fully remote, field-based role. You must be located in a major US metro, and we have a preference for Chicago or New York City. 

You will own the technical sales motion and the team that delivers it, reporting to the Vice President, Solution Engineering. You will partner with sales leadership on the forecast and carry the technical side of the deals that matter most. This is a hands-on leadership role, not one you manage from a dashboard. 

You will take over a team of six sales engineers and a mandate to double it. Much of the function doesn't exist yet. The person who joins now will shape how it operates, not just how it executes. 

WHAT YOU'LL DO 

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of sales engineers covering enterprise accounts
• Own the technical side of the forecast and represent it in weekly sales meetings
• Hold the team accountable for deal management and pipeline hygiene in Salesforce
• Hire and onboard sales engineers as the team scales, and raise the bar on who joins it
• Be in the field on the deals that decide the quarter, as the technical authority in the room
• Build the enablement, POV framework, and demo infrastructure the function needs
• Drive operational excellence with your sales and product counterparts
• Run cross-functional projects from scoping through delivery
• Bring field intelligence back to Product and Engineering 

WHAT YOU'LL BRING 

Required: 

• 5+ years leading a solutions engineering or sales engineering team as a first-line people leader
• Experience owning a sales forecast and the methodology behind it
• A bias for organization and project management, bringing structure to a team that needs more of it
• Enterprise cybersecurity experience, with the credibility to speak across security domains
• Technical SaaS selling experience
• Track record selling into large enterprise accounts, including complex multi-stakeholder deals
• Startup experience,  bringing brand new category-defining technology into the market
• Hands-on technical depth, enough to still run a demo, scope a POV, and hold your own in a room of security architects, SOC leaders, and CISOs
• Located in a major US metro and able to travel up to 50% of the time 

Preferred: 

• Experience scaling a sales engineering team through a period of rapid growth
• Experience owning a defined region or territory as a leader
• Background in detection and response, vulnerability management, exposure management, security operations, or the AI SOC space
• Experience working within a formal enterprise sales methodology such as MEDDICC/MEDDPICC, Force Management, Challenger, or similar
• Prior involvement in building or refining a POV framework or SE playbook
• Experience partnering closely with post-sales and customer success teams