Your hardest technical buyer used to be me.
I am a sales engineer and solutions architect, ten years into a career in IT. I have worked both ends of the security sales cycle.
I have been the security engineer writing the RFP, and the vendor engineer answering it. I have sent the security questionnaire, and I have sat down and filled one in. I have run the proof of concept as the customer, deciding whether a tool survived contact with our environment, and as the vendor, with the deal riding on the result.
So when I am in front of a customer's security team, I am not guessing at what they need to hear. I still write those questions: I vetoed a vendor recently for turning up without a SOC 2 Type 2. I know what wins deals, how to position a product, and I know how to hunt for the yes but find the quick no.
I have made that case from our stage at Black Hat, in customer workshops, and in a university lecture hall in India.
I am looking for a Sales Engineering or Solutions Architecture role in platform security, blue-team tooling, or cloud infrastructure.
Presenting
A Syxsense Master Class I delivered on realtime endpoint management. This is the format I ran for prospects and at industry events, so if you want to see how I handle a technical audience before spending an interview slot on it, start here.
How I got here
I started on the operations side, with about a year at Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories doing Linux endpoint security, hardening the fleet to CIS benchmarks with Chef and standardizing the Linux build the company ran on.
For three years after that at Syxsense I ran the technical side of the sales cycle: proofs of concept, RFI and RFP responses, architecture sessions in critical infrastructure and government, and webinars when marketing needed one.
I was one of three sales engineers, and I was thrown in without much of a ramp. In my first year I was the presales support on deals representing 50 percent of the company's total revenue, including deals north of a million dollars. Over the next two years that share went to 40 percent and then 30 percent, which was the goal. I was hiring and training the sales engineering team by then, and the work of that period was getting the number to stop depending on any one person.
Since March 2024 I have been at AvatarFleet as senior security and systems engineer, on the buying end of the same market. I built the security program from nothing, led it through SOC 2 Type 1 and Type 2 with zero adverse findings, and wrote the Terraform and Ansible that enforce the controls. I have also been the person answering the security questionnaires and clearing the vendor reviews that block enterprise deals, which is the same paperwork your customers will point at your product.
In a POC that means I can scope against a stack I have had to operate myself, write the integration instead of filing a feature request, and answer a customer's security team without escalating. Here is how I run one, and the rest of the portfolio is here.
Why sales engineering
The last two and a half years have been spent deep inside one organization's security program, and I have learned more doing it than in any stretch before. What I have missed is having technical work attached directly to whether the business grows. In presales the line between a conversation on Tuesday and a deal that closes is short enough to see, and I want to be back on it.
The other half of it is that I do not want to stop building. Plenty of roles that touch strategy at an organizational scale turn into slide decks and forecast calls. Sales engineering is one of the few where scoping the architecture and writing the integration that proves it land on the same person.
That is the combination I am looking for again.
Where I fit
The technical seat in the sales cycle
Discovery, POC design and delivery, architecture review, RFI and RFP response, competitive positioning, and the webinar or conference talk when marketing needs one. I ran that cycle at Syxsense for three years and led the team that ran it with me. I am the person the customer's security team gets to question directly, which is the part of the job I like.
Blue-team depth
Vulnerability management, patch and configuration management at scale, SIEM and log pipelines, endpoint controls, IAM design and audit, incident response, and the compliance evidence that has to come out the other end. I have owned each of those in production and been audited on most of them.
Background
Featured work
This site, end to end
Hugo content and the Terraform that runs it, in one public repository. Push to main and GitHub Actions builds, syncs to S3, invalidates CloudFront, and reconciles AWS. Private origin, IAM Identity Center, serverless contact and capture APIs. Roughly a dollar a month.
SOC 2 Field Manual for seed stage SaaS
What a small team actually has to build before its first SOC 2 engagement, organized by platform and budget. Controls domain by domain, how to pick an auditor, the compliance calendar, and a straight read on Drata, Vanta, Secureframe, and doing it in a spreadsheet. Long, and written from audits I have sat through.
Jarvis, an executive summary agent
A containerized agent that reads 24 hours of activity across AWS Security Hub, billing, GitHub, Gmail, Drata, and monitoring, summarizes each source through its own LLM prompt, posts one Slack brief, and exits. Drop-in plugin architecture; a failed plugin degrades the brief instead of killing it.
Local NVD database
Pulls the full NIST National Vulnerability Database into your own PostgreSQL instance so you can join CVE data against your asset inventory and ask questions the public UI will not answer. Built for teams that would rather own the data than query someone else's portal.
Hiring for an SE or SA seat?
I am open to Sales Engineering and Solutions Architecture roles in platform security, blue-team tooling, or cloud infrastructure. I am based in Moscow, Idaho, and happy to relocate for the right role. Send a note about the product and the team and I will tell you whether I think I am a fit.