Sales Engineer

About Kion and the role

Kion is revolutionizing CloudOps and FinOps. We offer a unified approach, delivering multicloud, multi-org, and multi-account visibility and controls, empowering organizations to effectively manage their complex cloud environments from a single, centralized platform. At Kion, you'll join a team that values collaboration, creativity, and building products that make a real impact for customers across industries.

We're a fast-growing, Series A startup and we believe employees are our most precious resource. While we're headquartered outside Baltimore, MD and Washington DC, we are committed to a 100% remote-first workforce. In addition, Kion offers excellent compensation and outstanding benefits!

One of our core values is turning customers into fans. Turning prospects into customers is the prerequisite, and the bar doesn't stop there. Every interaction is a chance to earn that fandom, and this role sits at the front of that motion.

If you're the kind of person who lights up in front of a prospect, who sees a hard problem and wants to be the one in the room when it gets solved, you'd be a great addition to our team.

YOUR ROLE

The Solutions Engineer is the customer-facing engine of Kion's pre-sales motion. You're the person carrying the story through the evaluation, hearing what a prospect actually needs in discovery, shaping the eval around it, running the demos, and keeping the room moving from "interesting" to "we have to have this."

This role leans heavily pre-sales, closer to 80/20 or 90/10. POVs, custom demos, technical discovery, executive briefings, and evaluation orchestration are the core of the work. You'll partner closely with the broader Solutions team on every meaningful deal, leaning on teammates for the deepest configuration and integration work while you own the narrative arc, the prospect relationship, and the business outcome they're buying toward.

The most important thing you'll do isn't a demo. It's leaving every call with the prospect feeling heard and in good hands, even when the answer isn't ready yet. People buy from people they trust, and a great SE turns a technical evaluation into a relationship that survives the messy parts, then carries that trust forward into the customer phase.

Why this role matters: You're the person who makes a prospect's evaluation feel like the easiest part of their year. Not by pitching, but by showing up curious, asking the questions their internal team isn't asking them, and making them look smart to their own stakeholders. That's the first step in turning them into a fan.

YOUR DAY-TO-DAY:

At Kion, everyone shows up for what's needed. That's part of what makes the team effective and the growth real. Expect meaningful context switching between internal and external work, discovery and demo, strategic and tactical. If you thrive when no two days look the same, this is the right seat.

• Lead discovery calls and technical evaluations end-to-end. Uncover what the prospect actually needs, map it to Kion, and shape the eval around the outcomes that matter to them.
• Run product demonstrations that meet the room where it is, whether that's a CFO who cares about cost recovery, a CISO who cares about guardrails, or a cloud engineer who wants to see the API.
• Partner closely with the broader Solutions team on every deal. You own the prospect relationship and the narrative, leaning on teammates for the deepest technical workstreams. The handoffs across the team should feel seamless from the outside.
• Build the business case alongside the prospect. Quantify the problem, frame the solution, and make sure stakeholders inside their org are equipped to advocate internally.
• Translate complex technical capabilities into language that lands with non-technical buyers without losing the technical buyers in the room.
• Anticipate objections before they're spoken, and surface them so they can be addressed before they kill momentum.
• Build reusable demo flows, discovery frameworks, and prospect-facing collateral that make every future engagement sharper.
• Translate prospect and customer feedback into product insight in close collaboration with Product and Engineering teams.

WHAT WE ARE EXPECTING FROM YOU (I.E., THE QUALIFICATIONS YOU MUST HAVE):

• 3 to 6 years in a customer-facing technical role: Solutions Engineering, Sales Engineering, or Solutions Architecture with a strong pre-sales lean.
• Demonstrated ability to lead a prospect through a technical evaluation. Not just demo a product, but shape the journey from first call to decision.
• Working knowledge of at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP). Enough to demo confidently, hold your own with a cloud engineer, and know where the real-world complexity lives.
• Familiarity with the cloud governance space: IAM, policies, compliance frameworks, FinOps concepts, and the messy reality of multi-account environments at enterprises.
• Comfort with authentication frameworks (SAML, LDAP, Active Directory, RBAC) at the conversational and demo level.
• Strong presentation and storytelling skills. You can hold a room of mixed technical and non-technical stakeholders and keep them all engaged.
• Calm under pressure. When a demo breaks, a stakeholder pushes back, or the room goes cold, you slow down, read what's happening, and adjust without losing the thread.
• Comfortable using AI as a working tool, not a shortcut. Drafting tailored demos, prepping for discovery calls, summarizing prospect environments on the fly. This is part of the job, not a bonus skill.
• You show up with humility and honesty, especially when you don't have the answer. Prospects and teammates trust you because you're straight with them, not because you always have a solution on the spot.
• Up to 15 to 20% travel for prospect meetings and industry events.

STRONG SIGNAL:

• You've sold or evaluated into enterprises and know how those buying processes actually work: multiple stakeholders, internal politics, parallel evaluations, and the silence that follows when something's off.
• You've worked alongside teammates with complementary skill sets and have opinions about what makes those partnerships work.
• You can tell the difference between a prospect who's truly stuck and one who's stalling, and you know what to do about each.
• You build things to figure them out: demos, scripts, internal tools, not because someone asked you to.
• You're energized, not exhausted, by context switching and wearing multiple hats.

GROWTH PATHS

This role has real trajectory. Depending on where your strengths and interests take you, natural paths forward include growing as a Solutions Engineer, moving deeper into a strategic Solutions Architect track, evolving toward a Technical Account Manager or Customer Success function, or stepping into broader GTM. There's a lot of motion across the team and intentional investment in where people grow.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE:

• Sales reps actively want you on their deals, not just because you're technical, but because you make the whole motion sharper and prospects consistently come back asking for more time with you.
• Your work within the broader Solutions team is invisible from the prospect's view. The handoffs across the team feel like one person.
• Prospects leave every interaction more confident than they came in, even when their hardest question doesn't have an answer yet.
• Evaluations convert at a higher rate because the discovery you ran shaped the eval around what actually matters to the buyer.
• The customers you brought across the finish line become fans, and they say so in references, expansions, and the relationships that keep coming back to you long after the deal closes.
• You've built a library of demo flows, discovery frameworks, and prospect-facing collateral the whole team relies on.

Total Compensation: $150,000 - $160,000