Sales Engineer

About the Role The Keystone AI Sales Engineer is a hands-on, deeply technical pre-sales leader responsible for delivering the technical win across opportunities within their territory. Keystone AI sells to the most demanding Java estates in the world — enterprises running mission-critical, high-throughput, latency-sensitive applications on the JVM — so this role demands genuine engineering depth, not just presentation polish. A Sales Engineer earns credibility with engineers, architects, and executives alike by getting hands on : running technical evaluations in the customer’s own environment, tuning the JVM, interpreting GC and performance data, and translating measurable technical outcomes into clear business value. Beyond individual deals, the Sales Engineer uses their experience to mentor and uplevel the broader SE team. What You'll Do (aka Responsibilities) Own the technical win. Drive pre-sales engagements end to end — discovery of the prospect’s business and technical challenges, mapping Keystone AI portfolio capabilities to those challenges, and validating the solution through demonstration and hands-on proof. Lead hands-on pilots. Design, scope, and personally execute product pilots and proofs-of-concept inside the customer’s existing environment: installing and configuring the JVM, running representative workloads, and capturing empirical results the customer trusts. Prove performance. Plan and run performance-focused engagements: establish benchmarks and success criteria, measure latency, throughput, GC pause behavior and resource efficiency, analyze GC and JIT logs, tune JVM settings, and quantify the improvement Keystone AI delivers against the incumbent. Win at enterprise scale. Navigate complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise engagements (large production estates, strict SLAs, security and compliance review, and long procurement cycles) coordinating technical validation across many teams and environments. Present at every altitude. Deliver presentations and demos across all technical levels, from CxOs to hands-on developers, to “make the complex simple” and communicate Keystone AI’s value to each audience. Respond to technical requirements. Understand and respond to solicited and unsolicited proposals (RFI/RFP) by aligning Keystone AI capabilities against detailed technical and business requirements. Orchestrate the extended team. Engage Product Management, Engineering, and the CTO office as needed to remove technical blockers and secure the win. Partner on territory strategy. Work alongside your Account Executive(s) on territory planning: pipeline generation, growing existing accounts, and enabling partners. Grow and retain customers. Nurture existing clients to promote customer success and to create new upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Evangelize. Present at conferences, workshops, and roadshows to raise awareness of the Keystone AI portfolio and build funnel. Mentor the team. Provide expert assistance to other SEs on pilot planning and execution, run training sessions, and serve as a primary mentor to onboarding SEs. Be a trusted advisor. Advise your manager on product, territory, and team matters. Technical Competencies These are the core technical strengths that define a successful Sales Engineer at Keystone AI: Java & the JVM. Deep, hands-on knowledge of Java internals and the JVM: class loading, JIT compilation, memory model, and garbage collection. Able to read and reason about GC logs and runtime behavior, not just describe them. Performance engineering. Practical experience benchmarking, profiling, and tuning JVM-based applications for latency, throughput, and scale; comfortable diagnosing GC pauses, warm-up, jitter, and resource-efficiency issues in production-like conditions. Hands-on aptitude. Confident on the command line and in customer environments: installing, configuring, and troubleshooting runtimes; able to build and run a POC independently. Enterprise application stacks. Solid understanding of Java-based applications and frameworks that run on or alongside Keystone AI products (e.g., Cassandra, Kafka, Solr, Spring). Cloud & containers. Working knowledge of cloud platforms (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP) and container/orchestration technologies (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes). Portfolio SME. Demonstrate SME-level depth and breadth across the entire Keystone AI product suite, and continuously grow technical acumen through enablement, hands-on experimentation, and self-study. What You'll Bring Qualifications 5+ years in a Sales Engineering / pre-sales role supporting enterprise software, ideally in the Java, middleware, performance, or infrastructure space. 3+ years of hands-on Java development or testing experience with a demonstrable command of Java architecture. Proven track record of hands-on pilots and POCs and of performance-related engagements where you measured and demonstrated technical results in a customer environment. Experience selling into large enterprises — complex, multi-stakeholder, mission-critical production environments. Bachelor’s d