The Way We Work
The people who thrive here are builders who move fast, communicate openly, take ownership, and continuously improve themselves, their teams, and our company. Here's what that looks like in practice:
- Move with Urgency: We move quickly, make thoughtful decisions, and keep momentum. We value action over perfection and learn by shipping.
- Take Ownership: We own outcomes, not just our individual work. We make decisions that move the company forward and follow through.
- Communicate Openly: We communicate directly, seek to understand, and create clarity for others. Honest conversations help us move faster together.
- Build Great Teams: We lead by example, empower others, and create healthy teams where people can do their best work.
- Raise the Bar: We're always improving ourselves. We learn from feedback, consistently challenge ourselves to grow, and focus on the work that matters most.
- Think Long-Term: We design for what's next. We create scalable systems, simplify complexity, and use AI and automation to amplify our impact.
VP of Solutions Engineering
Team: Solutions Engineering
Location: [NYC] - Hybrid
Reports to: CRO or CEO
About the Role
We are looking for a VP of Solutions Engineering to build and lead the technical field organization that helps Lightning AI win, onboard, and expand strategic customers. This is a senior leadership role for someone who can combine technical depth, enterprise selling discipline, customer empathy, and operating rigor. You will define how Lightning AI proves value in the field, how our technical teams partner with Revenue, and how customer patterns translate into better product and GTM execution.
What You'll Do
- Build, lead, and scale the Solutions Engineering organization across enterprise, strategic, channel, and technical specialist motions.
- Own the technical sales strategy for complex enterprise opportunities, including discovery, demo strategy, architecture, POC methodology, technical validation, and executive alignment.
- Partner with Sales leadership to improve win rates, deal velocity, qualification quality, forecast confidence, and technical differentiation.
- Develop a repeatable field engineering playbook for AI infrastructure, ML workflows, platform adoption, technical evaluations, security reviews, and enterprise buying committees.
- Recruit and develop exceptional MLSEs, Solutions Engineers, technical leaders, and field specialists.
- Create clear standards for demos, POCs, technical discovery, architecture reviews, customer handoffs, and product feedback loops.
- Represent Lightning AI with executive and technical customer stakeholders, including CTOs, VP Engineering, Heads of AI, ML platform leaders, research leaders, and infrastructure leaders.