Pre-Sales Engineer

As a Pre-Sales Engineer, you will be the primary technical resource for the sales team, responsible for bridging the gap between complex authorization challenges and PlainID’s innovative solutions. You will partner with Regional Sales Managers to drive revenue by demonstrating technical superiority and business value to prospects and customers. This role requires a unique blend of deep technical expertise in identity security and the business acumen to translate technical success into defensible ROI for C-suite stakeholders.

What You'll Do:

• Technical Leadership: Lead deep-dive technical discussions and discovery sessions with architects, security engineers, and business owners to uncover requirements and use cases.
• Solution Demonstrations: Present and demonstrate PlainID’s platform, highlighting key differentiators.
• Proof of Concept (POC) Management: Own the end-to-end POC process, from initial scoping and environment configuration (Kubernetes/Helm/EC2) to policy building and final executive readouts.
• Strategic Sales Partnership: Collaborate with Regional Sales Managers to navigate complex sales cycles, respond to RFx, and align technical solutions with organizational goals.
• Business Value Mapping: Identify "the why" behind a prospect’s move to PBAC/ABAC—such as driving revenue, reducing risk at scale, or securing Agentic AI—and document this value in executive summaries.
• Ecosystem Integration: Guide customers on integrating PlainID with their existing identity ecosystem (IDPs, IGA, PAM) and enforcement points like API Gateways (Apigee, Kong) and Data Platforms (Snowflake, Databricks).

What Makes You a Great Fit:

Technical Requirements -

• IAM Domain Expertise: At least 5 years of hands-on experience in Identity Security as a Sales Engineer, Solution Architect, or similar technical pre-sales role.
• Modern Authorization: Deep understanding of PBAC and ABAC methodologies; familiarity with OPA/Rego policy language is highly preferred.
• Identity Standards: Proficiency in OIDC, SAML, SCIM, and OAuth 2.0; awareness of emerging standards like AuthZEN is an advantage. Familiarity with SPIFFE & SPIRE preferred.
• Infrastructure & DevOps: Proven experience with Linux/Windows environments and containerization (Kubernetes, Helm charts, AWS ECS). 
• API & Data Ecosystems: Working knowledge of RESTful APIs, API Gateways (Apigee, Kong), and major data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, SQL).
• Agentic AI Security: Familiarity with securing AI agents, agent architectures including MCP, RAG, LangChain/LangGraph, etc., NHI (non-human identities), including concepts like "on-behalf-of" (OBO) execution and agent discovery. 
• Certifications: Information security certifications such as CISSP and CISA, as well as AWS or Azure certifications such as AWS Cloud Practitioner/AI Practitioner, Azure AZ-900/AI-900/DP-900 are considered an advantage.

Professional Skills & Acumen -

• Communication: Exceptional presentation skills with the ability to explain complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strategic Thinking: Ability to perform gap analyses and provide technical commitments that align with long-term partnership goals.
• Project Management: Capability to manage multiple POCs and technical workstreams simultaneously while maintaining momentum.
• Collaboration: A true team player who can work across Product, Global Services, and Marketing teams to ensure customer success.
• Willingness to travel up to 50% within your assigned region to support onsite customer engagements and partner events.

Position's salary range: $190,000-$230,000 OTE