Director of Solutions Engineering

About the role

We're hiring a Head of Solutions Engineering to lead the global team that helps the world's most ambitious companies understand what video AI can actually do for them. This is a player-coach role. You'll carry your own deals while building the systems, playbooks, and people that scale our pre-sales function as TwelveLabs grows.

About The Team

• The Field Engineering team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of TwelveLabs' video understanding APIs for developers and enterprises.
• The Solutions team, part of Field Engineering, is focused on accelerating the sales process for high-impact prospects and customers. They work closely with Sales to articulate technical value, design compelling proof-of-concepts, and demonstrate how our platform solves critical business challenges.

What You'll Do

• Hire, develop, and manage a global team of Solutions Engineers, building a high-performance pre-sales function that scales with the business.
• Define and continuously improve our technical sales methodology, from discovery frameworks and qualification criteria to POC playbooks and the handoff to post-sales.
• Partner closely with Account Executives across regions to prioritize opportunities, set technical win strategies, and close high-value deals.
• Roll up your sleeves on strategic accounts: lead discovery sessions, design proof-of-concepts, and deliver executive-level presentations that tie back to measurable business value.
• Build a library of reusable assets — demo environments, reference architectures, integration templates, competitive battle-cards — that multiply the team's effectiveness and reduce time-to-value for prospects.
• Serve as the authoritative technical voice in the sales cycle for our most complex enterprise opportunities, including architecture reviews, security assessments, and compliance conversations.
• Represent the voice of the market to Product and Engineering: turn prospect feedback, competitive intelligence, and common objections into actionable input that shapes the roadmap.

Requirements

• 8+ years in technical pre-sales, solutions engineering, or sales engineering, including at least 2 years managing or leading a pre-sales team, ideally with experience operating across multiple regions.
• Have sold or built on top of AI/ML platforms, APIs, or developer infrastructure, and can credibly engage with both a machine learning engineer and a Chief Data Officer in the same meeting.
• Bring deep familiarity with LLMs, multimodal AI, REST APIs, and modern cloud architectures, with a strong grasp of video workflows and the enterprise buying process around AI.
• Have a track record of building repeatable pre-sales motions from scratch — playbooks, tooling, hiring profiles, onboarding programs — not just inheriting them.
• Have a real point of view on the video market — who the buyers are, where budgets are shifting, and what's actually broken in how enterprises handle video today.
• Whether it's media and entertainment, sports, security, or content moderation, you can tell a customer not just what TwelveLabs does, but where it fits in their existing stack.
• Built joint go-to-market motions with cloud and ISV partners — AWS, GCP, Azure, or category-defining ISVs — and know how to turn a marketplace listing or co-sell program into actual pipeline.
• An exceptional communicator who can translate complex technical capabilities into business outcomes, and who makes both customers and internal teams better by being in the room.
• Thrive in environments where the product, market, and team are all evolving at once, and where leadership means making decisions before all the information is in.
• Know how to balance the immediate pressure of closing deals with the longer-term work of building a team and function that scales.