r/salesengineers

I'm a Forward Deployed Engineer following experience doing agentic workflow automation to business units internally. Before that I was "just" a full stack engineer. And all the companies jumping on the bandwagon of this FDE title have no idea what they're doing yet. In some cases it's just Sales Engineer, in other cases it is this new hybrid thing amplified by agentic coding of solutions that are focused on automating workflows also agentically.

Now, I'm over here reinventing the wheel, but do I even need a normal resume. Job experience in reverse chronological order, stacks I used, some results. A skills section of some software and software development lifecycle I use

Like, people really want to know "how big was the contract I was on, how much time did we save the client agentically, how much money did we save them and justify our ability to make in contract negotiations"

I can do this for my own independent practice, like a website for a side consulting company I run

but has anyone had any luck surfacing that info on their resume, a new big section. or even at the expense of the other sections? like, software stack itself isn't even that important for agentic engineering. Everything's changing so fast.

hey everyone, my first ever post on Reddit.

I am trying to find people who had experience working with Yuji Higashi and Mattie from Better Career SE coaching. I applied for their coaching several weeks ago, reached out to Mattie on LinkedIn, reached out to Yuji but haven’t heard anything back. is it expected/normal to not hear from them for weeks?

could you please share your experience with the team?

i really need some coaching to get my first SE role .

thanks in advance

Is this a viable career path for someone who wants to work in consulting but does not like coding?

Context: I have experience in deployment. automation, devops etc

Dont like coding, hate object oriented code.

Want to focus on career path which little coding and more on product, definitely not a product manager which is ambigous.

Which is why i was checking this out like solutions/sales/customer engineering kind of profile than a typical technical expert which will make me burnout.

I'm a SWE with 3 years of experience. I want to be in a more client facing role, however I'm just unsure regarding the stability of the field compared to pure software. I've heard input from both sides but would love to see the thoughts and opinons of this subreddit regarding this topic. I'm sure some of you folks were previously SWE's prior to becoming SEs?

Does anyone have links to some excellent same Salesforce demos?

I’ve been in Salesforce consulting for the past two years, and recently interviewed for a SE role with a Salesforce partner. First ever SE interview and demo, and I completely bombed the demo. I prepared the sample org and everything and followed the interview instructions, but I just couldn’t put it together well.

I’d like to think my Salesforce knowledge is decent, given the multiple certs I have, and real life experience working on implementations, etc.

TLDR: Besides salesforce’s own resources, does anyone have a YouTube video or another video of sample demo an SE either at Salesforce or a partner org would give?

Our AI Presales team has undergone re-org to move into a POD structure with FDE (so FDE roles too moved under sales OU).

This will be a hands-on keyboard role with aim to implement and activate AI POCs with select strategic customers & take them live.

We were earlier doing cxo meets, discovery, demos, sizing etc. tagteaming with Account SEs and AI AEs.

With this change I am worried that our role narrows down from being a strategic and consultative role to an operational one with daily firefighting of issues to take POCs live within customer org.

Is my concern valid?

Am I reading this wrong?

Is this how AI solutions roles are shaping up everywhere?

Anyone in a similar role, how's ur experience been?

Should I start looking out?

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Check the box if this has ever happened to you during a demo.

☑️ Huge demo scope with coffee-break timing

“Can you show everything in 30 minutes? Just the essentials: finance, inventory, billing, integrations, BI, mobile, security, APIs, and roadmap.”

☑️ The sales brief is completely misaligned with the customer’s expectations

Sales says: “It’s just a high-level overview.”

The customer joins saying: “Today we need to validate 47 mandatory requirements.”

☑️ The demo invite arrives with no context, no objective, and no confirmed audience

Meeting title: “System demo.”

Description: blank.

☑️ The audience changes five minutes before the meeting

It was supposed to be a conversation with users. Suddenly, executives, IT, procurement, legal, and someone who “just joined to listen” enter the room.

☑️ Sales promised a personalized demo without telling the specialist

“I told them you would show exactly their workflow.”

Specialist: “Which workflow?”

Sales: “The one they will explain now.”

☑️ The demo environment works perfectly until ten minutes before the meeting

Universal demo law: everything worked yesterday.

☑️ Access, password, or VPN does not work.

“Your password has expired.”

“Your access has been revoked.”

“This environment is under maintenance.”

☑️ The demo is scheduled without knowing who is the decision-maker, influencer, or user

There are 15 people in the meeting, and none of them knows exactly why they were invited.

☑️ A training expectation disguised as a demo

The invite says “demo.”

The customer joins with a notebook: “Can you teach my team how to operate it step by step?”

☑️ The customer joins thinking this is already system training

“Great presentation, but I’ll need help later to actually use the system.”

☑️ The customer is sleeping, or almost sleeping, during the demo

Slow blinking. Camera off. Or literally sleeping.

☑️ The demo is delivered to the wrong people

“Loved the demo. Too bad the people who really needed to see this are not here.”

☑️ Sales insists live that the system does something it does not do

Specialist: “This point needs to be validated.”

Sales: “But it does that, right?”

☑️ Sales is completely distracted during the demo

Doesn’t take notes, doesn’t support the chat, doesn’t catch objections, and at the end asks: “So, how did it go?”

☑️ Someone asks about price in the middle of the most important workflow

“Before we continue, how much does it cost?”

☑️ The online meeting has its own soundtrack

Dog barking, construction noise, open microphone, echo, aggressive typing, and a “Can you hear me?” every five minutes.

☑️ The specialist asks “Does that make sense?” and gets a generic “yes” — or worse, silence

Which may mean: I understood, I didn’t understand, I want this to end, or I’m answering emails.

☑️ The customer treats the exception as the rule

“But what if this operation happens on a Saturday, without internet, with retroactive approval and a complementary invoice?”

“Does that happen often?”

“No, but it could.”

☑️ The demo becomes the customer’s internal process meeting

They start discussing workflows, department conflicts, internal rules, and who should approve what. You become a spectator with screen sharing enabled.

☑️ Sales answers for the specialist — incorrectly

“Yes, that’s native.”

It wasn’t. It never was. Maybe it never will be.

☑️ Sales asks if they can send the proposal immediately

Even with 12 technical pending items, the wrong audience in the room, and no validated pain point.

☑️ Sales leaves the meeting with a much more optimistic view than reality

Specialist: “We have important risks.”

Sales: “The customer loved it. It’s basically closed.”

Sup FDE's I know you're in here

yeah yeah the title is just mostly just a rebrand of you sales and solutions engineers, but regardless I wasn't doing this or what you guys are doing a year ago, just Lead/Staff Full stack engineer, that picked up agentic automations quickly.

and now I've got questions, because now that I have been doing FDE work for a long enough and its the hottest growing job title out there, recruiters and hiring managers are coming out the woodwork

I'm remote, and I don't go anywhere. I like this, because I can go anywhere and not take any PTO to do so, as long as i have internet connectivity and make my meetings everything is good. But MOST FDE roles are like "its remote, but there's a travel requirement" specifically not to the people I work for's office, but POTENTIALLY to client's offices for "Up to 50% of the time" but they don't even know who the clients are

I'm tempted to just ignore those roles, but it seems very common. In my current FDE role I don't travel

how do you sales/solutions and other FDE's deal with this? if I didn't have other things going on, I'd love to travel around the country on someone else's dime but right now it would hamper my style

do you just convince the client that it can all be done remotely or what

I’m trying to decide between two offers coming out of college as an electrical and computer engineering student: SWE role at FAANG vs. SE role at a smaller company in a niche industry.

The software role is more technical and obviously has strong brand value, but I’m a bit concerned about the culture and the work itself. I don't particularly enjoy programming and things like intense performance expectations, constant fear of being laid off, and the overall work pressure in big tech scare me.

The sales engineering role offers a much better work life balance (lots of vacation, remote, secure job), is more business-facing, and less purely technical which I would enjoy. However, it is significantly less salary ($80k less a year) and change my career path. For people who’ve been in either path, how did you think about long-term career options, compensation, and work-life balance when choosing between something like this?

- Company: iVerify
- Title: Sales Engineer
- Salary Range: 100k-110k GBP
- UK Remote (Ireland Preferred as training and onboarding would be at our HQ in Belfast, but UK with ability to travel is fine)

I’m the hiring manager so happy to answer any questions. Looking for someone with a background in mobile & MDM, and any familiarity with cybersecurity (especially as it relates to mobile) would be a huge plus.

Solutions Engineers/Architects/Presales

What’s is your current base salary, and OTE. Also if any RSU or anything like that, what is it? List your seniority in the company and years of experience.

Let’s figure out what is the actual market value for what we do

What is it?
Do you use your SE skills at all?

Fill me in I’m curious!

Hello all,
I have my first SE interview ever tomorrow and it is a 30 minute interview with a peer SE. The recruiter let me know that it will be sales and personality along with foundation in cloud. I have never done a sales focused sales engineering interview before, so I am not sure what kind of questions to expect. I am pretty confident in my cloud knowledge.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated!

Edit: I am currently a SWE

I’d like to get some perspective from people who have been in presales for a number of years, especially in professional services / consulting environments.

I joined a professional services company as a presales consultant after previously working as a solutions architect for a number of years. In my previous role, I led major implementations, enhancements, transformation projects, migrations, and support engagements for large enterprise customers in my area of speciality.

The presales role is still within the same specialist area, but the day-to-day work is very different from what I expected.

In practice, we usually have one or two discovery calls with a customer, then break the solution down into milestones, activities, deliverables, effort estimates, required roles, assumptions, dependencies, out-of-scope items, and commercial inputs. We also calculate the effort and discounts directly as part of the proposal process, not only for RFPs.

From there, presales creates the proposal and the customer presentation deck, then presents it back to the customer.

When we are not creating proposals, we are responding to RFPs. In those cases, we effectively act as the bid managers as well. We handle the response content, effort calculations, rate cards, third-party discounts, commercial calculations, managed service estimates, FTE costs, discounts, proposal wording, and the presentation deck for the RFP presentation.

The company does not sell software licences. We only sell professional services, meaning consultants on projects, managed services, advisory work, and similar engagements. Because of that, presales does not do product demos.

POCs are also not handled as presales activity. They are treated as chargeable professional services work.

The challenge I am struggling with is that the role feels like a constant conveyor belt of quick discovery calls, effort calculations, discounting, commercial inputs, proposal creation, customer presentation decks, and RFP responses. We are completely maxed out most of the time, so there is little to no time for vendor training, technical development, or deeper solution work (which management does not seem concerned by, they just want proposals and effort calculations done).

We are also not involved in the post-sales or project delivery side, so there is very little feedback loop once a proposal becomes an actual engagement.

Personally, I feel like I am losing touch with the hands-on and architectural side of my speciality. More importantly, I am concerned that this could become dangerous for my long-term reputation and career, because I am no longer enhancing my skills through real delivery experience or deeper technical exposure.

We also work on fixed salaries with no commission or bonus structure, so the role carries a lot of sales and commercial pressure without the compensation model usually associated with sales roles.

From my past experience working with presales consultants from vendors and other organisations, I always understood presales to involve more solution shaping, technical credibility, customer advisory, demos, POCs, strategic influence, and a proper feedback loop into delivery.

I may be completely wrong, and perhaps this is simply what presales looks like in a services-only organisation. But I would really appreciate honest views from people who have done presales for many years.

Is this normal for presales in professional services, or is this more of a bid/proposal/commercial role being labelled as presales?

I just found out I didn’t move forward after the second interview for a Solutions Engineer role at Verkada. Pretty bummed about it.

I’ve been a Systems Administrator at an MSP for about 4 years. I work across client environments, cloud infrastructure, networking, endpoint/admin work, security tools, troubleshooting, and general “figure out the problem and make it work” type issues

I was interested in the SE role because it seemed like a good next step toward solution design, customer-facing technical work, demos/POCs, and infrastructure planning instead of staying in the MSP ticket grind forever.

From the job posting, I expected it to be technical but not extremely deep network engineer level. The interview ended up going pretty deep into networking fundamentals DHCP/DORA, DHCP relay, NAT, TCP/HTTPS/TLS, subnetting, etc. I could talk through practical troubleshooting and real world scenarios, but I definitely felt rusty on the more textbook/protocol level explanations.

I’m trying not to take it personally, but it still sucks. The role seemed like a real career jump.

For people who moved from sysadmin/MSP work into Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer, Technical Account Manager, or Customer Success Engineer roles:

What should I focus on tightening up?

Is this kind of networking depth normal for SE interviews?
Are there better intermediate roles to target before going after SE roles?

Right now I’m thinking my gap is not hands-on troubleshooting, but explaining deep networking fundamentals cleanly under pressure.

EDIT - they called back and wanna do the third interview!!!!! If you have any tips please let me know!!

If you'd chose to stay, why? I'm struggling to think of a single reason.

So often RFPs feel like a waste of my work hours and expertise when I could spend my time on more engaging work.

Just to see how everyone else divides their time. What time do people spend on RFPs, to demoing, to admin tasks, etc?

I’m an SE and often get feedback from a particular rep that I need to ask before I communicate anything to a prospect. I don’t get this ever from any other rep I have worked with in the past.

Strategies that have worked for others here or should I just do as I’m told?

I read so many stories from SEs here that are in software (and I enjoy the reads) but I'm just curious how many of you are in other industries.

I'm in the manufacturing industry for pharmaceuticals support and have a background in mechanical engineering. What about you others?

Hi all, would appreciate some honest perspective from people actually in this field.

**Background:**

I have an engineering degree in automotive, along with a Master's in International Business. I've also done some specialized technical training and internships related to electric vehicles, mostly simulation and validation work.

On the commercial side, I ran a small sourcing and procurement business for a few years, working with international suppliers and manufacturers. Unfortunately it wound up due to COVID, followed by a personal family emergency that meant I had to step back and be at home for a while. I've also done a short stint as an investment analyst, evaluating early-stage startups.

**What I'm drawn to:**

I like the idea of being someone who understands the technical side of a product well enough to speak credibly about it, while also building relationships and driving the actual sale. My long-term goal is to eventually build something of my own, and I see sales engineering as a way to build both technical credibility and business instincts along the way.

**What I don't have:**

No formal sales engineering job yet, I'm currently job hunting in automotive, EV, and industrial sectors. My commercial experience is real but mostly self-employed rather than structured corporate sales experience.

**My question:**

Does this kind of background realistically translate into Sales Engineer roles, or am I missing something companies actually look for?