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
Hiring is a big decision on both sides. Read more about our Hiring Philosophy https://socket.dev/hiring-philosophyand how we approach the process at Socket.
Benefits: Our benefits are crafted to support you and your family, so you can take care of what matters most and thrive in and outside of work. We offer:
Market competitive salary bands
Meaningful equity program
Comprehensive health benefits for you and your family (99% coverage)
Flexible time-off, holidays, and winter shutdown to rest & recharge
Paid parental leave
Remote-first, with quarterly team off-sites
At Socket, we
1. Pursue Excellence: We set ourselves apart by consistently delivering work of exceptional quality and distinction.
2. Move with urgency and focus: We prioritize swift, decisive action.
3. Think rigorously: We care about being right and it often takes reasoning from first principles to get there. We value alternative perspectives and have constructive discussions.
4. Trust and amplify: We overtrust, always assume good intent, and give specific feedback to help each other improve.
5. Feel a strong sense of ownership: We wear many hats and feel a strong sense of overall ownership of the company and we're non-territorial regarding our nominal domains.
6. Are customer obsessed: We relentlessly prioritize the needs of our customers, striving to exceed their expectations and delight them at every interaction.
