Director, Sales Engineering
Palo Alto, CA · HybridFull-time$270–300K/yrPosted 1 day agoStill listed today
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Job overview
Nightfall AI is hiring a Director of Sales Engineering to lead three sales engineers across Enterprise and Commercial while remaining hands-on in demos, technical evaluations, and key deals. The role builds the team’s playbook and enablement, connects field feedback with product and engineering, and partners with the CRO on scaling sales engineering. It also represents Nightfall with customers and industry events and uses AI tools to accelerate sales engineering work.
Skills & qualifications
Skills
Qualifications
Full job description
About Nightfall: Nightfall is the AI-native, unified data loss prevention and insider risk management platform that protects sensitive data across SaaS apps, GenAI tools, email, endpoint devices, and more. Hundreds of customers, spanning AI innovators to top 10 banks, trust Nightfall to detect and stop data exfiltration at scale. Nightfall enables organizations to innovate freely without the risks of losing intellectual property or exposing customer data. Our agentic platform helps security teams regain their time by putting data loss prevention on autopilot. With automatic remediation, security violations can be resolved automatically before they become incidents, and end-users can be automatically trained and coached in the moment to self-heal violations that they introduce. Nightfall is backed by leading VC firms including Bain Capital Ventures (Enrique Salem - former CEO of Symantec), Venrock (early investors in Cloudflare), WestBridge Capital, Pear VC (early investors in Dropbox and Doordash), and a cadre of cybersecurity leaders including Frederic Kerrest (founder of Okta), Maynard Webb (former COO of eBay), Ryan Carlson (President of Chainguard), Kevin Mandia (founder of Mandiant), and many others. About the role: We're hiring a Director of Sales Engineering to lead our SE team and shape how Nightfall wins technically. You'll lead three SEs covering Enterprise and Commercial deals, and you'll stay hands-on: running demos, building labs and jumping into the deals where you can make the difference.
Enterprises are deploying AI tools and agents faster than their security programs can keep up, and buyers want to see how Nightfall protects their data across people, AI agents, SaaS, email and endpoints. You'll make sure every technical evaluation shows that clearly, and you'll bring what you hear in the field back to our product and engineering teams.
This is a player-coach role. You'll work closely with our CRO on how sales engineering scales as we grow.
WHAT YOU'LL DO
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Lead and grow the SE team. Manage, coach and develop three SEs across Enterprise and Commercial. Set coverage, run deal and demo reviews, and hire as the team grows.
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Stay hands-on. Run demos, technical deep dives and proofs of value on key deals, and step in when a technical win is on the line.
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Build the SE playbook. Create the discovery guides, demo flows, POV frameworks and lab environments that our team and channel partners use to win.
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Run sales and product enablement. Lead regular sessions so AEs, SEs and partners can position new releases and handle technical objections.
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Close the loop with product and engineering. Capture field feedback, feature requests and losses, show their impact, and work with product and engineering on what gets built next.
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Partner with our CRO. Shape plans for SE capacity, coverage and process as we scale and accelerate growth.
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Show up in the field. Travel to industry events and customer meetings as needed, and represent Nightfall with CISOs and security teams.
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Work AI-forward. Use tools like Claude to speed up demo prep, RFPs, POV reporting and enablement.
WHAT YOU'LL BRING
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Sales engineering leadership experience, including managing SEs, ideally at a high-growth security company.
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You're still hands-on. You can run a technical demo or POV yourself, and you've built demo environments or labs.
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Experience selling cybersecurity, ideally data security, DLP, SSE/CASB, insider risk or endpoint, to CISOs and security teams.
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Technical depth across SaaS applications and APIs, endpoint agents, browsers and cloud environments (AWS, Azure or GCP).
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A track record of building SE playbooks and running enablement that improved win rates or ramp time.
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Experience turning field feedback into product changes, working closely with product and engineering leaders.
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Experience working with channel partners and their SEs. We're a channel-first company.
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Comfort presenting to executives and representing your company at events, and willingness to travel for events and customer meetings.
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Located on the West coast preferred
BONUS POINTS
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Experience with AI security, or securing AI tools and agents.
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You've built an SE function from the ground up at a Series A to C company.
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Scripting or automation experience (Python, APIs, infrastructure as code).
Environment Nightfall AI takes pride in being an equal-opportunity employer. We value a diverse and global talent pool and the collaboration that results from having a diverse and inclusive team. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status. Our hiring decisions are based exclusively on merit, qualifications, and business needs.
Compensation Employee compensation will be determined based on interview performance, level of experience, specialization of skills, and market rate. During the offer discussion, your recruiter will review the finalized base salary, bonus (for applicable roles), benefits & perks, and stock options as they’ll be reflected in the offer letter.
How this job compares
Set against the 1,401 open Sales Engineering jobs on Olive Jobs, counted November 11, 2026.
- Pay
- This posting$270–300K/yr
- California median$160–240K/yr166 salary ranges
- US median$149–228K/yr1,056 salary ranges
This range's midpoint, $285K, is 41% above the California median midpoint ($201K) — in the top quarter of Sales Engineering salary ranges in California.
- Openings
- Olive Jobs lists 196 open Sales Engineering jobs in California and 1,401 across the US. 26% of them nationwide are listed as remote or flexible.
- Experience
- Sales Engineering postings that state a minimum ask for 5 years of experience at the median; the middle half ask for 4 to 7 years (1,008 postings).
- Education
- 226 of the 1,401 open Sales Engineering jobs (16%) ask for a bachelor's degree or higher.
Counted across the open, public US postings on Olive Jobs on November 11, 2026. Pay medians are the middle values of the low ends and of the high ends of postings that list both ends of a range in the same cadence (a yearly salary or an hourly rate); a range's midpoint is halfway between its ends. Pay and experience figures resting on fewer than 20 postings are left out.
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