Sales engineer (SE, solutions engineer, presales)
The technical person on a vendor’s sales team: runs the demo, answers architecture and security questions and shows before you sign that the product fits.
Job ads use sales engineer, solutions engineer, solutions consultant and presales engineer for roughly the same work. The SE joins the account executive after the discovery call, tailors the demo to your case, fills in the security questionnaire and often runs the proof of concept. The goal is the tech win: your technical team agreeing that the product can do the job. After signing, the work usually passes to an implementation or customer success team. A Forward Deployed Engineer stays after signing and builds in your environment; the two roles are compared in this post.
Related terms
- Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE): An engineer who works with a customer or business team to turn AI models into systems that run in their environment.
- Discovery call (disco): The first real sales conversation, which salespeople call a disco: the vendor learns your problem, its cost and who decides, before any demo or quote.
- Wizard of Oz demo (happy-path demo, demo theater): Names for demos that look more finished than the product: a person secretly doing the work, a scripted happy path, or a polished show of a single case.
- Proof of concept vs pilot (PoC, POV): A proof of concept shows something can work on sample data; a pilot runs it for real users on real data; a proof of value measures whether it pays.
- Security questionnaire (vendor risk assessment, SIG, CAIQ): A list of security and privacy questions a company sends a vendor before buying, to judge the risk of trusting it with data and access.
- Consultative selling: Selling by diagnosing the buyer’s problem first and proposing only what solves it, including telling the buyer when the vendor is not the right fit.
