Senior Solution Engineer (Pre-sales)

Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States URL: https://apollographql.com At Apollo GraphQL, we’re on a mission to make it radically easier for engineering teams to ship fast, reliable products and services on top of the world’s data, powering everything from web to mobile to agentic experiences.. We’re looking for a Senior Solution Engineer who loves stepping into business‑critical challenges and turning them into clear, elegant architectures that customers can’t wait to build. As a Senior SE, you’ll be the technical quarterback on some of our most important opportunities: partnering with prospects and customers to design and scale their supergraph on GraphOS, and helping them prove out real impact in production. You’ll join a tight‑knit global SE team that collaborates closely with Sales, Marketing, Product, and Engineering—so the work you do doesn’t just close deals, it directly shapes Apollo’s roadmap and how we show up in the market. At its core, this role connects customer problems, Apollo’s capabilities, and value: uncovering the real problem, translating technical options into business outcomes, building technical confidence, and reducing buying risk. What you’ll do • Own complex technical evaluations for strategic new and existing accounts: lead discovery, workshops, and solution design to deeply understand customer APIs, architectures, and constraints, and turn them into clear required capabilities and technical win plans. • Design and present multi‑system solution architectures that show how Apollo’s supergraph, GraphOS, and tooling fit into modern cloud‑native environments —meeting customers where they are while charting a safe, future‑proof path forward. • Lead compelling, value‑focused demos and PoCs , translating complex technical capabilities into simple, business‑aligned stories for audiences ranging from lead developers and architects to VP/C‑suite decision makers. • De‑risk and win complex deals by anticipating and resolving technical blockers (security, compliance, integration, performance), building customer confidence that Apollo will work in their environment, and partnering with AEs on value‑based selling, and close strategy. • Partner tightly with Sales, CS, Product, and Engineering : act as a trusted advisor throughout the account lifecycle, feed structured field insight back into roadmap and positioning, and contribute reusable reference architectures, playbooks, and patterns that the broader team can use at scale. • Elevate the team through enablement and AI‑augmented workflows : mentor junior SEs, share best practices, and actively use AI tooling (including agentic/MCP‑based workflows) to improve discovery, architecture design, and demo/PoC execution. Who you are You’re an experienced, hands‑on Solutions Engineer (or architect in a similar customer‑facing role) who loves sitting at the intersection of code, architecture, and commercial impact. You’re just as comfortable whiteboarding a distributed system with staff engineers as you are explaining the “so what?” to a VP of Engineering or CIO, and you thrive when you can roll up your sleeves on a PoC, earn technical trust, and guide a customer from “evaluation” to “we can’t imagine building without this.” You see Solutions Engineering as part of the go‑to‑market engine: your purpose is not just to “be technical” but to help progress qualified opportunities toward successful outcomes—new ARR, healthy renewals, and meaningful expansions. Minimum requirements • 4+ years in a pre‑sales Solutions Engineering or equivalent technical customer‑facing role (sales engineer, field engineer, customer engineer, or architect) working on complex B2B SaaS or infrastructure products. • Deep domain expertise around APIs and integration , with