Manager, Sales Engineering - Socket

About Socket

Socket helps devs and security teams ship faster by cutting out security busywork. Thousands of orgs use Socket to safely find, audit, and manage open source code. Our customers—from Anthropic to xAI, and Figma to Vercel—love Socket.

Founded by Feross Aboukhadijeh, a long-time open source maintainer with software downloaded over a billion times a month, Socket has raised $125M in funding from top angels, operators, and security leaders.

About the Role

Socket is looking for a Manager, Sales Engineering to lead the team that helps security and engineering buyers understand our product, validate its value, and confidently choose Socket.

Our buyers are technical. They expect clear answers, credible demonstrations, and evaluations grounded in their actual workflows, not generic pitches. You'll coach Sales Engineers to connect software supply chain security to customer priorities, partner closely with Sales leadership, and build a repeatable technical sales motion that scales.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll hire and develop strong SEs, improve discovery and proof-of-concept execution, and join strategic customer conversations when your experience can change the outcome.

What You'll Do

• Lead, coach, and grow a regional SE team. Implement Socket’s established hiring, onboarding, development, and performance-management practices.
• Partner with Sales leaders and AEs on deal strategy, qualification, coverage, and prioritization.
• Implement a consistent evaluation motion: agreed success criteria, customer owners, timelines, technical risk tracking, and documented outcomes.
• Inspect strategic deals and stalled evaluations, identify the real blocker, and coach the SE.
• Stay technical enough to support demos, integrations, and complex customer conversations.
• Be the voice of the field to Product and Engineering, partnering with TAMs and Customer Success on clean pre-to-post-sales handoffs.
• Report on key metrics: technical win rate, POC durations, POC starts, and quota attainment.

What You'll Bring

• Required:

  • 7+ years as a Sales or Solutions Engineer and 2+ years directly managing SEs.
  • Experience leading technical sales for commercial or enterprise customers, selling to developers and security teams.
  • A track record of improving team performance through specific coaching and operating changes.
  • Credibility in a technical conversation: CI/CD, package managers, the open source ecosystem, Linux, and scripting in Python or JavaScript.
  • Experience building or improving pre-sales systems such as evaluation frameworks, coverage models, or demo standards.
  • Experience managing through growth at an evolving startup.
  • Strong partnership with Sales leadership.
  • Clear communication with practitioners, CISOs, engineering leaders, and executives.
  • Willingness to travel up to 25%.

• Preferred:

  • Experience in software supply chain security, AppSec, DevSecOps, or SCA.
  • Experience managing SEs across more than one segment.
  • Practical use of automation and AI tools to improve SE productivity.

Our Interview Process

1. Phone Screen with our Talent Team
2. Virtual f2f with the Hiring Manager
3. Virtual f2f with a few members of the team
4. Presentation
5. Final call with our Founder
6. References
7. Offer

Benefits

• Market competitive salary bands
• Meaningful equity program
• Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family (99% coverage)
• Flexible time-off, holidays, and winter shutdown
• Paid parental leave
• Remote-first, with quarterly team off-sites