Who we are.
Solo.io is reimagining infrastructure for cloud and AI. We unite secure, seamless cloud connectivity with AI-ready, agentic infrastructure, and leading enterprises worldwide trust us to securely connect their applications, services, and AI workloads across any environment.
Joining Solo means working at the center of how enterprises adopt AI: on open source projects built in the open with a global community, alongside the people who created them, for customers who are among the largest in the world. If you want to help organizations accelerate innovation, scale intelligently, and put modern AI agents to work, we’d love to meet you. Learn more at www.solo.io.
About the role.
The Director, Solutions Engineering is a player-coach leadership role responsible for winning the technical evaluation in every deal across our Central and West regions. You will lead a team of Solutions Engineers directly, partnering with regional sales leadership to turn open source adoption of Istio, kgateway, agentgateway and kagent into enterprise customers. You will manage and develop the team, build the repeatable processes that make them consistent, and stay hands-on enough to lead architecture sessions and POCs on our most complex opportunities yourself. Our buyers are platform engineering, security and architecture teams at some of the largest companies in the world, and our deals are won on technical credibility.
Job Description:
- Lead and develop a team of Solutions Engineers across the Central and West regions, setting a high technical bar and coaching on discovery, demos, POC strategy, and executive communication.
- Act as technical executive sponsor on the region’s largest and most complex opportunities, leading architecture sessions, design reviews, and objection handling yourself when the deal requires it.
- Own the technical win in region: decide which deals to go deep on and which to qualify out, and set clear POC success criteria with customers before work begins.
- Partner with regional sales leadership on account strategy, SE coverage, deal reviews, and forecast accuracy.
- Build repeatable assets such as discovery frameworks, reference architectures, demo environments, and POC playbooks.
- Position Solo against open source DIY, hyperscaler offerings, and other agnetic infrastructure, API gateway, and service mesh vendors in competitive evaluations.
- Act as the voice of the field, bringing structured customer and competitive feedback to the product management, engineering, and marketing teams.
- Represent Solo in the community through customer workshops, meetups, industry events, and technical content creation.
