Senior Solutions Engineer

The role

You are the person prospects talk to when the conversation gets real: how KrakenD fits their architecture, whether it can replace their current gateway, how it can govern their AI and agent traffic, and what the migration looks like. This is not a support role or a demo role. You work directly with enterprise engineering and architecture teams, influence deal outcomes and feed product and marketing with what you learn in the field. You work alongside sales and engineering in a tight, high-trust loop.

What you'll do

• Run technical discovery: understand the prospect's stack, pain points and constraints before pitching.
• Design and deliver proof-of-concept implementations tailored to each prospect's environment.
• Run AI Gateway evaluations: routing and failover across LLM providers, token budgets, prompt guarding, and exposing existing APIs as MCP tools for agents.
• Answer evaluation questions, from configuration to performance benchmarking to plugin architecture, with engineering support.
• Support partners and integrators on their deals: technical enablement, joint demos and PoCs.
• Build and maintain demo environments, technical documentation for sales and reusable assets.
• Sync with engineering on needs and emerging patterns that improve the product.
• Turn field feedback (objections, blockers, comparisons with other API and AI gateways) into input for product and content.
• Own the technical win: sales closes, you make closing possible.

What we're looking for

Technical foundation

• Hands-on experience with API gateways, reverse proxies or middleware (KrakenD, Kong, Nginx, Envoy, AWS API Gateway or similar).
• A coding background, ideally with infrastructure tooling.
• Solid grasp of REST, GraphQL, gRPC and service-to-service communication.
• Hands-on with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini or self-hosted models) and a working understanding of the Model Context Protocol: servers, tools, transports and how agents authenticate against APIs.
• Comfortable with Docker, Kubernetes and cloud-native deployments.
• Able to write configuration, scripts or light code (Go, JavaScript, Lua or similar) for demos and integration checks.
• Familiar with OAuth2, JWT and OpenID Connect, and with resilience patterns such as circuit breakers and rate limiting.

Business and sales fluency

• Can run a discovery call, find the real problem behind the stated one and map it to business impact.
• Can position technical trade-offs for an engineering director or CTO.
• Has been involved in enterprise sales cycles and knows how technical validation moves or stalls deals.
• Writes clearly: proposals, technical briefs and follow-ups.

Mindset

• Comfortable with low process and high autonomy.
• Switches naturally between a whiteboard architecture session and a contract objection.
• Cares about being right, not about being agreeable.

Nice to have

• Experience at an API management, developer tooling or infrastructure company.
• Familiarity with KrakenD, ideally having deployed it.
• Experience working with software integrators or in channel-assisted sales.
• You have built something with agents or MCP (a server, an integration, a side project you can show us).
• Awareness of emerging agent protocols such as A2A, and of other AI gateways.

What we offer

• Fully remote, async-first culture without micromanagement.
• Direct access to leadership and real influence on product direction.
• The chance to build this function from scratch and define what great looks like.
• Unlimited holidays and flexible hours.
• Fixed salary: €80,000–90,000 gross per year
• Commission tied to company performance, for on-target earnings of €120,000–130,000.

Our process is fast and respectful of your time.

• Application review (1-2 business days) We review your profile and responses to the screening questions.
• Intro call (30 min, video) A conversation with the CSO & co-founder, to understand your background, motivations, and answer your questions about KrakenD. No trick questions, just a real conversation.
• Sales simulation (60 min, video) A practical exercise where you'll demonstrate how you approach prospecting and discovery. We'll give you a realistic scenario and watch how you think, not just what you say.
• Final conversation (45 min, video) We'll discuss expectations, comp, and next steps. You'll also have a chance to ask anything you want about the company.
• Offer If there's mutual fit, we move fast. Expect a decision within a week of your final conversation.

Total timeline: Typically 2-3 weeks from application to offer.

Note: We're hiring during the holiday season. Expect some delays between late December and early January. The process may take 1-2 weeks longer than usual. We'll keep you informed at every step.