Pre-sales Engineer (US Based - Remote)

About the role

This role sits between sales and engineering. You own the technical story in a deal, run the workshops with the customer's ops and IT people, and design the pilot that gets us from "this looks interesting" to a signed contract. You work closely with Account Executives in your region, report directly to Tom, and hand off cleanly to Forward Deployed Engineering once a pilot is signed.

Responsibilities

• Run discovery and process mapping with customer teams — systems, handoffs, exceptions, approvals — and turn it into a pilot scope with a clear Definition of Done.
• Connect the proposed solution to measurable business outcomes: margin, availability, working capital, revenue, or cycle time.
• Build and demo pilots against the customer's own workflow, data shape, approval rules, and write-back targets. No generic decks.
• Own the technical evaluation: security review, integration sizing, RFPs, architecture questions, and IT objections.
• Bring in Product or Engineering only when you genuinely need them.
• Guide customers through early platform testing — kickoffs, first workflow captures, and resolving issues before they stall the evaluation.
• Push back on scope, timelines, or success metrics that won't work — good judgment beats saying yes.
• Stay in the deal through pilot delivery, then hand it over cleanly to Forward Deployed Engineering so what was sold is what gets built.

Qualifications

• 5+ years in pre-sales, solutions engineering, applied AI, enterprise automation, or forward-deployed work, selling or delivering into enterprise operations, IT, or finance buyers.
• Retail or consumer goods experience is a plus.
• Hands-on with modern AI systems — LLMs, agentic workflows, tool use, evaluation, and their practical limits — not just conversant in the concepts.
• Strong process discovery and systems thinking — you can understand an unfamiliar operation and find the leverage points.
• Comfortable with APIs, JSON, webhooks, SQL, and light Python or JavaScript.
• You don't need to be a software engineer, but you can investigate and prototype.
• Strong commercial judgment — you qualify use cases, size value, spot a buying signal, and know when to escalate.
• Excellent communication — you shift altitude quickly between operators, architects, and executives, and explain complex systems in plain English.
• A track record of crisp, discovery-led demos rather than long product monologues.
• Fluent English.
• Willingness to travel to customer sites.