Sales Engineering Leader

We believe that the way people interact with their finances will drastically improve in the next few years. We’re dedicated to empowering this transformation by building the tools and experiences that thousands of developers use to create their own products. Plaid powers the tools millions of people rely on to live a healthier financial life. We work with thousands of companies like Venmo, SoFi, several of the Fortune 500, and many of the largest banks to make it easy for people to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they want to use. Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the US, Canada, UK and Europe. Founded in 2013, the company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in New York, Washington D.C., London and Amsterdam.

The Sales Engineering team at Plaid is composed of dedicated technical team members who work to connect the dots between the business value promised by our products and the technical solutions that enable them to realize that value. This team plays a crucial role in ensuring our prospects and customers understand technical guidance, driving product adoption, growth, and deeper customer relationships. Their mission is to turn every prospect into a customer, and every customer into a lifelong Plaid champion and advocate.

The Sales Engineering Leader will serve as a highly visible technical sales expert while leading our dynamic Sales Engineering team within the GTM organization. We seek a detail-oriented and thoughtful leader who is committed to delivering a first-class pre-sales experience and increasing value for Plaid’s prospects, customers and partners. The ideal candidate will possess strategic thinking skills, a strong technical background, leadership experience, sales experience and a deep passion for customer success. This leader will mentor, develop, and grow the Sales Engineering team while continuously optimizing processes and internal tools to ensure the highest level of service is delivered efficiently.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and scale a team of high-performing sales engineers
• Establish best practices, processes and standards for pre-sales activities.
• Partner with sales leadership to strategize on deals, develop sales pitches, complete deep technical discovery and tailor technical presentations to drive better outcomes for prospects, customers and Plaid.
• Evolve the upmarket sales engineering team to focus more on deep discovery and solutions architecting
• Drive the development and execution of more self-serviceable pre-sales opportunities for prospects including scalable demo environments and proof-of-concepts (POCs).
• Gather feedback from prospects and customers, communicate and work closely with Product, Engineering, Marketing, Customer Success and Support to shape the product roadmap and align product features with customer needs.
• Serve as the escalation point and technical advisor to strategic customers, addressing complex needs and solution-fit.

Qualifications

• 7-10+ years of experience leading a high-performing sales engineering and/or solutions engineering team
• Passion for connecting sales skills with technical expertise
• Ability to build a network internally and externally to support the team and customer success
• Desire to get your hands dirty and jump right in with your team, prospects and customers
• Executive presence and confidence to manage executive relationships internally and externally, including experience communicating technical concepts and articulating value to C-level executives
• Self-motivated, detail-attentive, curious and hungry for continuous learning
• A strategic and critical thinker who defaults to a customer-centric consultative approach
• Ability to work under pressure, deadlines and navigate unexpected roadblocks with a customer-first attitude and a strong sense of empathy