Senior Sales Engineer (Pre-Sales) - ZeroTier

The Senior Sales Engineer is a pre-sales customer-facing, quota-adjacent role on the Sales team. You'll spend your days in discovery calls, demos, POVs, and deal strategy—participating in post-sales technical escalation support on occasion as well as collaborating with customer success and customer onboarding requests. Note: This is not a software or network architect role. Pre-sales Engineering experience is required.

About ZeroTier

ZeroTier leads the world in next-generation connectivity and cybersecurity. Our platform provides highly secure, peer-to-peer virtual networks relied upon by millions of users and businesses—from individual users and startups to mid-scale enterprises and Fortune 500 companies.

The Role

You are the technical counterpart to our Account Executives and the trusted advisor to buyers. You own the technical win: discovery, solution architecture, demos, and proof-of-value engagements end-to-end, then hand off cleanly to Customer Success.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical win across the deal cycle: discovery and qualification with AEs, demos, POV design and execution, and technical close.
• Run structured POVs with clear success criteria, mutual action plans, timelines, and exit decisions for deployments ranging from ten nodes to tens of thousands.
• Deliver demos and whiteboard sessions that resonate with audiences from hands-on network engineers to CISOs and procurement executives.
• Win competitive deals, articulating where ZeroTier beats Tailscale, WireGuard-based stacks, and legacy VPN/SD-WAN vendors.
• Answer RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires, translating FIPS, CNSA 2.0, 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—reproducing issues, capturing evidence, and escalating defects.
• Build the SE machine: demo environments, reference architectures, battle cards, and POV runbooks.
• Feed the field's voice into the product: structured win/loss insights, deployment patterns, and roadmap input.

What We’re Looking For

• 4+ years customer-facing pre-sales experience as a Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Solutions Architect attached to a sales team and quota.
• Elite discovery skills: uncovering real problems and disqualifying 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, and crisp status communication.
• Excellent written communication: clear, polished, and technically precise architecture docs and RFP responses.
• A builder's mindset: low ego, high ownership, and comfortable with ambiguity.

Technical Bar

• Strong networking fundamentals: Layer 2 vs. Layer 3 behavior, routing, NAT/NAT traversal, firewalls, DNS, and overlay/underlay separation.
• Comfort at the packet level using Wireshark or tcpdump.
• Solid Linux and cloud experience (AWS, Azure, GCP): VPCs, routing, security groups, and hybrid connectivity.
• Hands-on familiarity with at least two of: SD-WAN, ZTNA, VPN technologies (WireGuard, IPsec, OpenVPN), container networking, or IoT connectivity.
• Working knowledge of SSO/identity (OIDC, SAML, Entra ID/Okta).
• Scripting fluency in Python or Bash to automate demo environments and use REST APIs.

Nice to Have

• Selling into defense, government, or regulated sectors (DOD, GovCloud, sovereign infrastructure).
• Background in OT/industrial environments (Modbus, IEC-61850, SCADA).
• Prior work at an overlay networking, mesh VPN, ZTNA, or SD-WAN vendor.
• Experience as an early SE hire building the function.
• Working grasp of modern cryptography, quantum threat models, and NIST PQC standards.

How We Work

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 customer-facing work.