Senior Sales Engineer (Pre-Sales) (Networking)

Location: Hybrid role based in Utrecht, the Netherlands; three days per week in the office at Utrecht Central Station and two days working from home. Occasional travel is required for key customer engagements, POV kickoffs, and industry events.

Company

ZeroTier develops secure peer-to-peer networking and cybersecurity software for individuals, startups, enterprises, and defense customers.

What you will do

• Own the technical win across discovery, qualification, demonstrations, proof-of-value engagements, and technical close.
• Design and manage structured POVs with success criteria, mutual action plans, timelines, and exit decisions.
• Deliver whiteboard sessions and demos for network engineers, CISOs, procurement executives, and other customer stakeholders.
• Answer RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires covering networking, cybersecurity, regulatory, and post-quantum requirements.
• Architect solutions across hosted Central, self-hosted controllers, flow rules, bridging, multipath, SSO/OIDC, and Quantum deployment modes.
• Build demo environments, reference architectures, battle cards, and POV runbooks while feeding customer insights into Product and Engineering.

Requirements

• 5+ years of customer-facing pre-sales experience as a Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Solutions Architect attached to a sales team and quota.
• Strong discovery, executive communication, written communication, POV management, and deal-qualification skills.
• Strong networking fundamentals across Layer 2 and Layer 3 behavior, routing, NAT traversal, firewalls, DNS, and overlay/underlay separation.
• Hands-on use of Wireshark or tcpdump, solid Linux and cloud experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP, and familiarity with VPCs, routing, security groups, and hybrid connectivity.
• Working knowledge of at least two of SD-WAN, ZTNA, VPN technologies, container networking, or embedded/IoT connectivity, plus SSO and identity technologies.
• Fluent professional English is required. Scripting fluency in Python and Bash is required, including automating demo environments and using REST APIs.

Nice to have

• Experience selling to defense, government, regulated sectors, or sovereign infrastructure customers.
• Knowledge of European cybersecurity frameworks, OT and industrial environments, overlay networking, mesh VPN, ZTNA, or SD-WAN.
• Experience as an early Sales Engineer hire and in building pre-sales functions.
• Knowledge of modern cryptography, post-quantum standards, hybrid schemes, crypto-agility, CNSA 2.0, and European or NATO cryptographic requirements.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote-first collaboration with a hybrid schedule of three office days and two home-working days.
• Flexible working hours subject to management approval.
• Equity compensation package and retirement savings plan with employer contribution.
• 25 holiday days of paid time off per year.
• Career enhancement funds and an employee referral bonus.
• Close collaboration with Sales, Engineering, and Customer Success in a fast-moving environment.