u/ProfessionalAd7976

Hey yall, looking for outside perspective from people actually in sales engineering.

Background: graduated with a mechanical engineering BS last year, 7 month job search, landed a role as a “Technical Sales Engineer” at a small electronics component manufacturer that mostly serves aerospace, defense, medical, and industrial customers. The company is very small and private.

What my day to day actually looks like:
- I don’t really generate leads or prospect. Customers come to me already knowing what they need and asking if I can help.
- I’m the primary point of contact for customer accounts, including weekly live calls that cover both technical questions and commercial terms like pricing and delivery.
- I run product testing and verification against customer specific thresholds, using lab equipment to characterize performance and confirm parts meet requirements.
- I’m the QC signatory, the one who signs off on Certificates of Conformance before product ships.
- I do engineering calculations to support product selection, translating customer requirements into technical specs and recommending the right part for the application.
- When something comes back as a return, I run a root cause investigation with production management. Then we design the corrective fix. One example: traced a batch of returns to a manufacturing defect and built a new screening step to catch it going forward.
- I help coordinate outside qualification testing with third party labs when a new customer needs a part qualified, which helped land a first order from a new Fortune 500 aerospace customer.
- On the business side, I manage the full order pipeline (quotes/scheduling/shipment/post sale support) & contributed to about a 28% revenue increase over the past year through account support/order management.

Happy to add more detail on any of this if it helps give better context.

Pay is around $60k base plus bonuses which seems really low. I couldn’t complain though since it was my only offer in this market.

For people already in the field, I’m curious if the “no lead gen, just technical matching plus account management” version of the role I have tracks with how the field normally works, or if that’s unusual. And more broadly, is this a reasonable first job out of a Mech E program, or should I be more aggressively looking for something more purely technical.

Appreciate any honest feedback. Genuinely trying to figure out if I’m on a good track.

Hey, hoping to get experienced engineers’ perspective on my role. I graduated with a BSME degree last year and after a 7 month job search I finally landed a job. It is at a small private semiconductor company (photodiodes/fiberoptics, basically) as a “Technical Sales Engineer.” The title feels pretty underwhelming.

On the job though I:
• Run linearity tests on photodiodes using a curve tracer
• Calculate stuff like responsivity and dark current from raw data the technicians hand me
• Sign off on quality certs before stuff ships out / fill for quality meetings
• RMA reports and joining investigations on what went wrong
• On occasion I do some fiber optic coupling math (numerical aperture equations) to figure out how far a fiber needs to sit from a chip
• Sometimes I give clients measurements/tolerance calcs for specific part areas from drawings

I’ve also sat in on some meetings I didn’t expect to be part. Technical discussions with CTOs at other sensor companies about new product development requirements and qualification meetings with a major aerospace/defense prime alongside my GM. We usually fill technical questions about our test standards and material compliance. Sometimes it requires outsourcing tests for parts at different labs.

On top of that I handle a decent chunk of the business side too, order processing, compliance paperwork (REACH, RoHS, military standards stuff), talking to customers directly, that kind of thing.

Does this sound like real engineering experience. I worry I’ll oversell admin work while applying to my next job? The tech sales title tanks me. And if it is legit, what would the natural next step be? Test engineer, reliability engineer, something else?

Appreciate any honest takes.

Thank you guys in advance!