Senior Manager, Presales Autonomy Solutions Engineering
Shield AI
Sales & Business Development
San Diego, CA, USA · San Diego, CA, USA · Oregon, USA
Posted on Apr 11, 2025
Founded in 2015, Shield AI is a venture-backed defense technology company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent, autonomous systems. Its products include Hivemind Enterprise—EdgeOS, Pilot, Commander, and Forge—as well as V-BAT and Sentient Vision Systems (wide-area motion imaging software). With offices in San Diego, Dallas, Washington, D.C., Abu Dhabi (UAE), Kyiv (Ukraine), and Melbourne (Australia), Shield AI’s technology actively supports U.S. and allied operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X and Instagram.
Shield AI is seeking a Senior Sales Engineering Manager to lead and scale our technical pre-sales function for Hivemind Enterprise. This individual will hire and manage a team of high-performing sales engineers who engage with customers alongside our business development team to demonstrate, position, and technically integrate Hivemind into next-generation unmanned systems. You’ll serve as the technical bridge between our customer needs and product capabilities, ensuring rapid adoption and faster sales cycles.
Responsibilities:
- Lead, mentor, and grow a global team of sales engineers supporting Hivemind adoption across defense and commercial customers.
- Own and scale the technical pre-sales process, including demos, technical discovery, architecture design, and customer immersion programs.
- Act as the primary technical point of contact for the sales team and customers during deal capture, providing expertise on the technical aspects of our solutions V
- Build and maintain strong customer relationships by addressing technical concerns and managing expectations throughout the sales process.
- Collaborate with BD to identify customer needs and deliver technical presentations, support customer engagements as technical leads, provide engineering depth for BD Ops efforts in proposals, white papers, and RFIs.
- Work with engineering and product management to tailor existing solutions to customer requirements, ensuring technical feasibility and alignment with product capabilities, schedule, and roadmap.
- Assess and clear feasibility for opportunities outside the existing product roadmaps. Coordinate with engineering, product management, and project management to ensure new project technical scope and requirements are clearly defined and achievable, integrating them into the development process.
- Create and maintain technical documentation repository, ensuring materials are accurate, releasable, and accessible for the BD teams. Specific items that will be maintained: Presentations, Specifications, Roadmaps, Capability Briefs, Talk Scripts / FAQs etc.
- Educate the sales team on technical aspects of our solutions, developing materials and conducting training sessions to keep the team informed.
- Manage resourcing of sales engineers across business development deal capture efforts.
- Support international go-to-market efforts by training and embedding sales engineers into major and micro hub regions.
- Travel to customer sites globally for technical interchange meetings.
- Monitor industry trends and competitor products to provide insights and maintain a competitive edge.
Required Qualifications:
- 10+ years of experience in a Sales Engineering or Solutions Engineering role
- 5+ years of professional experience in building and managing sales or solutions engineering teams.
- Strong understanding of mobile robotics, autonomy, and AI/ML.
- Strong familiarity with C++ and Python.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, especially in customer-facing settings.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites globally for immersive engagements.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience supporting UAS, UGV, or maritime autonomy systems.
- Ability to speak or manage engagements in multilingual regions (Asia, Middle East, Europe).
- Proven success navigating pre-sales in complex, high-stakes defense environments.
- Prior experience with defense, aerospace, or dual-use technologies strongly preferred.
Full-time regular employee offer package:
Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity
Temporary employee offer package:
Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)
Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.
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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.