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Technical Bid Manager / Technical Proposal Specialist
The Technical Bid Manager (Technical Proposal / Pre-Sales Specialist) is a senior individual contributor who owns the technical integrity, commercial clarity, and win-ability of strategic proposals (RFPs, RFIs, RFQs, security questionnaires and customer proposals) for our global cyber security business. You will convert complex technical capabilities (cloud security, vulnerability management, CNAPP, GRC, application security, etc.) into clear business outcomes and persuasive deal narratives, validate solution architectures with product and architecture teams, and govern a reusable content library to scale proposal quality and speed. This role partners closely with Sales, Product, Solutions Architecture, Legal and Pricing and reports to the Sales CTSO.
Responsibilities
- Author, edit and own end-to-end technical proposal content: executive summaries, solution narratives, technical responses, architectures and value propositions that align to customer pain and buying criteria.
- Translate product/technical features into business outcomes (risk reduction, compliance, TCO, time-to-value) and craft win-themes and differentiators for target verticals.
- Collaborate with Product, Security Architects and Sales to shape solution scope, validate technical accuracy, define integrations, and document deployment/operational models.
- Map and articulate compliance and controls against standards (e.g., NIST, ISO 27001, SOC2, PCI, GDPR) in responses and security questionnaires.
- Curate and govern the central proposal knowledge base: standardized technical descriptions, control mappings, boilerplate answers, case studies and modular artifacts to maximize reuse and consistency.
- Partner with Marketing and Product Marketing to align proposal narratives with core positioning, messaging frameworks, and go-to-market themes, while feeding back field insights to improve solution briefs, datasheets, and competitive content.
- Create and maintain reusable customer-facing artifacts such as standardized proposal formats, solution overviews, PoV/POC documents, reference architectures, executive one-pagers, and technical appendices to accelerate future bids.
- Lead technical and narrative quality reviews, identify deal risks and gaps, and prescribe mitigation before submission.
- Drive adoption of proposal automation, templates, and AI-assisted authoring while ensuring rigorous QA and governance of AI outputs.
- Support post-submission activities: clarify technical queries, participate in bid defense calls, and provide materials for commercial/technical negotiations.
- Mentor and enable Proposal Coordinators; define style guides, templates and best practices; partner with Sales Ops to improve metrics and workflow efficiency.
Required Qualifications
Essential
- 3–7+ years of experience in technical proposal writing, bid management, presales engineering, cybersecurity consulting, or a closely related role supporting enterprise SaaS/security products.
- Strong technical knowledge across cybersecurity domains (cloud security, vulnerability management, application security, GRC, CNAPP or equivalent).
- Excellent English writing skills — ability to produce crisp, executive-level narratives and technically accurate responses.
- Demonstrated experience producing RFPs/RFIs/RFQs, security questionnaires, proof-of-value documents, SOWs or customer proposals end-to-end.
- Proven ability to collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders (Product, Architects, Legal, Pricing, Sales) and drive deliverables to meet tight deadlines.
- Hands-on with MS Office (Word/PowerPoint/Excel), and comfortable using SharePoint/Confluence or similar content repositories.
- Strong attention to detail, logical structuring of content, and a process-oriented mindset for quality and repeatability.
Preferred
- Familiarity with proposal automation / content management tools (Responsive, RFPIO, Loopio, Xait, Arphie, Ombud or similar).
- Exposure to CRM and workflow tools (Salesforce, Jira, Asana/Trello).
- Practical experience mapping controls to standards (NIST, ISO 27001, SOC2, PCI, GDPR).
- Experience using generative AI tools for drafting/summarization and the ability to validate and refine AI output.
- Prior experience with cybersecurity vendors, MSSPs, or enterprise security consulting.
Similar Industry Titles:
Presales Specialist
Technical Content Writer
Top Skills
What We Do
Qualys, Inc. (NASDAQ: QLYS) is a pioneer and leading provider of disruptive cloud-based security, compliance and IT solutions with more than 10,000 subscription customers worldwide, including a majority of the Forbes Global 100 and Fortune 100. Qualys helps organizations streamline and automate their security and compliance solutions onto a single platform for greater agility, better business outcomes, and substantial cost savings.
The Qualys Cloud Platform leverages a single agent to continuously deliver critical security intelligence while enabling enterprises to automate the full spectrum of vulnerability detection, compliance, and protection for IT systems, workloads and web applications across on premises, endpoints, servers, public and private clouds, containers, and mobile devices. Founded in 1999 as one of the first SaaS security companies, Qualys has strategic partnerships and seamlessly integrates its vulnerability management capabilities into security offerings from cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services, the Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, along with a number of leading managed service providers and global consulting organizations. For more information, please visit http://www.qualys.com
