Manager, Sales Engineering
About the Role
Socket is looking for a Manager, Sales Engineering to lead the team that helps security and engineering buyers understand our product, validate its value, and confidently choose Socket.
Our buyers are technical. They expect clear answers, credible demonstrations, and evaluations grounded in their actual workflows; not generic pitches. You'll coach Sales Engineers to connect software supply chain security to customer priorities, partner closely with Sales leadership, and build a repeatable technical sales motion that scales without relying on a few people to rescue every deal.
This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll hire and develop strong SEs, improve discovery and proof-of-concept execution, and join strategic customer conversations when your experience can change the outcome. Success means your team gets stronger and more independent, not that every difficult deal needs you in the room.
What You'll Do
- Lead, coach, and grow a regional SE team. Implement Socket’s established hiring, onboarding, development, and performance-management practices, and help drive adoption within Socket’s framework and standards. Run interview loops and help close strong candidates against the established hiring bar.
- Partner with Sales leaders and AEs on deal strategy, qualification, coverage, and prioritization. Help the team earn the technical win while Sales owns the commercial close.
- Implement a consistent evaluation motion: agreed success criteria, customer owners, timelines, technical risk tracking, and documented outcomes.
- Inspect strategic deals and stalled evaluations. Identify the real blocker, coach the SE, and escalate product or implementation gaps with clear context.
- Stay technical enough to support demos, integrations, and complex customer conversations, and turn what works into reusable demos, playbooks, and onboarding.
- Be the voice of the field to Product and Engineering, and partner with TAMs and Customer Success on clean pre-to-post-sales handoffs.
- Report on the metrics that matter: technical win rate, POC durations, POC starts, quota attainment. Find what’s not working and create informed strategies for improvement.
What You'll Bring
Required:
- 7+ years as a Sales or Solutions Engineer and 2+ years directly managing SEs, including hiring and ramping them
- Experience leading technical sales for commercial or enterprise customers, from discovery through demos, POCs, and technical validation, selling to developers and security teams
- A track record of improving team performance through specific coaching and operating changes, not by taking over difficult deals
- Credibility in a technical conversation: CI/CD, package managers, the open source ecosystem, and how developers work, plus comfort with Linux and scripting in a language like Python or JavaScript
- Experience building or materially improving pre-sales systems such as evaluation frameworks, coverage models, demo standards, or onboarding
- Experience managing through growth at a startup where process and resources were still evolving
- Strong partnership with Sales leadership: you prioritize support, challenge weak qualification constructively, and separate technical validation from close probability
- Clear communication with practitioners, CISOs, engineering leaders, and executives
- Willingness to travel up to 25%
Preferred:
- Experience in software supply chain security, AppSec, DevSecOps, or SCA
- Experience managing SEs across more than one segment
- Practical use of automation and AI tools to improve SE productivity, with sound judgment about accuracy and customer data
Our Interview Process
1. Phone Screen with our Talent Team
2. Virtual f2f with the Hiring Manager
3. Virtual f2f with a few members of the team
4. Presentation
5. Final call with our Founder
6. References
7. Offer