VP of Solution Engineering

What You'll Do

• Build, lead, and scale the Solutions Engineering organization across enterprise, strategic, channel, and technical specialist motions.
• Own the technical sales strategy for complex enterprise opportunities, including discovery, demo strategy, architecture, POC methodology, technical validation, and executive alignment.
• Partner with Sales leadership to improve win rates, deal velocity, qualification quality, forecast confidence, and technical differentiation.
• Develop a repeatable field engineering playbook for AI infrastructure, ML workflows, platform adoption, technical evaluations, security reviews, and enterprise buying committees.
• Recruit and develop exceptional MLSEs, Solutions Engineers, technical leaders, and field specialists.
• Create clear standards for demos, POCs, technical discovery, architecture reviews, customer handoffs, and product feedback loops.
• Represent Lightning AI with executive and technical customer stakeholders, including CTOs, VP Engineering, Heads of AI, ML platform leaders, research leaders, and infrastructure leaders.
• Partner deeply with Product and Engineering to surface field patterns, influence roadmap priorities, and close gaps that block enterprise adoption.
• Work with Partnerships, Customer Success, Marketing, and Revenue Enablement to build consistent technical messaging and scalable field assets.
• Establish the metrics, inspection points, and operating cadence for a world-class technical pre-sales organization.

What We're Looking For

• 12+ years in solutions engineering, sales engineering, field engineering, technical pre-sales, ML infrastructure, or related technical leadership roles.
• 5+ years building and leading high-performing technical field teams in enterprise technology markets.
• Deep understanding of complex technical selling, enterprise evaluation cycles, POCs, executive alignment, and cross-functional deal execution.
• Credibility with technical buyers and the ability to simplify AI, infrastructure, platform, and architecture concepts for senior business stakeholders.
• Experience partnering closely with Sales, Product, Engineering, Customer Success, Partnerships, Marketing, and Revenue Operations.
• Strong talent judgment and a track record of hiring, coaching, and developing technical field leaders.
• A high-accountability operating style with strong forecasting discipline, field inspection, and customer follow-through.
• Comfort leading in a fast-moving startup where the market, product, and GTM motion are evolving quickly.

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience in AI infrastructure, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, MLOps, data platforms, GPUs, or high-performance compute.
• Experience building a solutions engineering organization through rapid growth or category creation.
• Hands-on technical background in software engineering, ML engineering, platform engineering, infrastructure, or data systems.
• Experience supporting both direct enterprise sales and partner/channel technical motions.

Compensation

The anticipated annual base salary range for this role is $250,000–$400,000 USD. In addition to base salary, our total rewards package includes a discretionary bonus, meaningful equity, and comprehensive benefits.