Director, Presales Engineering

Proofpoint · Denver, CO · 3 days ago

Business DevelopmentFull-time

About Us

Proofpoint is a global leader in human- and agent-centric cybersecurity. We protect how people, data, and AI agents connect across email, cloud, and collaboration tools. Over 80 of the Fortune 100, 10,000 large enterprises, and millions of smaller organizations trust Proofpoint to stop threats, prevent data loss, and build resilience across their people and AI workflows. Our mission is simple: safeguard the digital world and empower people to work securely and confidently. Join us in our pursuit to defend data and protect people.

About The Role

The Director, Presales Engineering Excellence and Innovation will lead a high impact global function at the intersection of Sales Engineering, technical escalation management, field productivity, and product advocacy. This leader will step into a role that supports complex presales motions, advanced proof of concept execution, field escalation triage, AI driven workflow transformation, and strategic cross functional coordination across Sales, Product, Engineering, Enablement, Support, Security, Legal, and IT. The mandate is not only to maintain current operational continuity, but to modernize how Presales Engineering scales expertise, resolves ambiguity, governs technical access, and uses AI safely to improve customer outcomes. The ideal candidate is a technical operator, field strategist, transformation leader, and trusted escalation partner. They can move from executive level strategy to detailed operational execution, while building durable systems that reduce dependency on tribal knowledge.

What You Bring

10 or more years of experience in Presales Engineering, Sales Engineering, Technical Consulting, Escalation Engineering, Solutions Architecture, Product Specialist, or related customer facing technical roles.
5 or more years leading technical teams, transformation programs, field enablement efforts, or cross functional technical initiatives in enterprise software or cybersecurity.
Strong understanding of enterprise cybersecurity sales motions, including technical discovery, proof of concept execution, production evaluations, customer security architecture, objection handling, and executive level technical storytelling.
Demonstrated ability to lead complex escalations involving Sales, Product, Engineering, Support, IT, Security, Legal, and executive stakeholders.
Practical fluency with AI enabled workflows, LLM based tooling, knowledge retrieval, prompt engineering, agentic systems, governance models, and safe enterprise adoption patterns.
Experience building operating models, intake systems, governance frameworks, enablement libraries, automation workflows, or internal tooling for distributed technical teams.
Able to distinguish experiments from production ready capabilities, and to define the controls needed to move from one to the other.
Strong judgment around data access, least privilege, customer confidentiality, security review, compliance boundaries, and responsible AI usage.
Excellent written communication skills, with the ability to produce crisp executive updates, technical runbooks, decision registers, operating models, and field ready guidance.
A bias toward durable systems, clear ownership, measurable outcomes, and scalable enablement.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience with Proofpoint products, Sales Engineering workflows, presales support operations, or enterprise cybersecurity field organizations.
Experience with Data Security, Insider Threat Management, email security, cloud security, identity workflows, AI security, or enterprise collaboration security.
Experience with tools such as Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Slack or Teams, Google Workspace, Workday, CyberArk, SailPoint, vector databases, MCP servers, or enterprise AI platforms.
Experience creating governance for custom GPTs, internal AI agents, prompt libraries, knowledge pipelines, or connector based workflows.
Experience managing global teams or distributed technical stakeholders across AMER, EMEA, and APJ.
Success looks like presales escalations having clear intake, routing, ownership, and closure paths, field teams getting faster access to accurate technical guidance, without relying on one person's memory or informal channels, AI tooling becoming a governed multiplier for Sales Engineering productivity, not a shadow infrastructure risk, product advocacy becoming structured, evidence based, and tied to customer and revenue impact, access approvals, demo infrastructure, lab ownership, and technical queues having named owners and backups, new hires and internal transfers onboard through repeatable checklists and clear technical readiness paths, leadership getting concise, reliable visibility into risk, workload, blockers, and investment needs.

Why Proofpoint?