Senior Partner Sales Engineer

The role, in a nutshell:

Chainguard is hiring our first Senior Partner Sales Engineer to join the Partner team. This is a foundational role supporting our most strategic partnerships. You will blend technical solution-building, channel enablement, and partner strategy to help drive adoption and scale.

You will act as a key technical resource across the partner lifecycle. From delivering demos to delivering workshops and training. This role requires both technical depth and strong business intuition.

This is a great opportunity for someone who enjoys building from scratch, thrives in a fast-paced startup, and wants to shape how Chainguard engages with the broader software and security ecosystem.

This person should have experience & relationships with boutique, regional, national and GSI partnerships.

What you’ll do

• Provide pre-sales technical assistance and product education to channel partners
• Deliver product demos, technical presentations, and proof-of-concepts
• Help partners design and architect solutions using your company’s technology
• Assist with solution configuration, integration, and customization
• Support channel sales teams with technical guidance during the sales process
• Act as the technical expert during partner sales calls and meetings with end customers
• Help partners respond to RFPs/RFIs and build compelling technical proposals
• Translate customer needs into workable technical solutions
• Train and certify partners on your company’s products, solutions, and sales tools
• Create and maintain technical documentation, sales tools, and enablement materials
• Run technical workshops, webinars, and bootcamps for partner teams
• Work closely with Partner Account Managers to align on partner strategy and goals
• Provide feedback to product and engineering teams based on partner and customer input
• Collaborate with marketing to develop co-branded technical collateral or campaigns
• Assist partners with deployment planning and issue resolution
• Ensure customer satisfaction during the implementation phase, when needed
• Stay updated on new product releases, industry trends, and competitive technologies
• Continuously improve technical and sales acumen to better support partners

What we’re looking for

• 10+ years of experience in pre-sales engineering, partner engineering, or solutions architecture.
• Extensive experience building and presenting demos, technical enablement materials, and solution content for external audiences.
• Deep understanding of containers, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, and CI/CD tools.
• Creative approach to partner engagement—prototyping integrations and jointly developing solutions that are both technically robust and commercially relevant.
• Comfortable presenting to diverse audiences, including technical teams and executive stakeholders.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• Highly motivated self-starter capable of working autonomously and collaborating in distributed team environments.
• Bonus: Experience with Terraform, GitOps, or vulnerability scanning tools.

OTE RANGE (Based on location/experience): $225,000-275,000

About Us

Chainguard is the secure foundation for software development and deployment. By providing guarded open source software, built from source and updated continuously, Chainguard helps organizations eliminate threats in their software supply chains.

Founded by the industry's leading experts on open source software, security and cloud native development, Chainguard has built the largest library of open source software that is secure by default.

Chainguard’s mission is to be the safe source for open source.

We live and breathe our company values:

We are customer obsessed - We focus on delivering solutions to our customers that create value and make their lives better.

We have a bias for intentional action - We prioritize, plan, try things, and fail fast.

We don’t take ourselves too seriously (but we do serious work) - We are solving an important problem which takes focus, but we also like to enjoy the journey.

We trust each other and assume good intentions - We’re transparent with decisions to empower team members to make well informed decisions.

A few of the benefits we offer:

• Flexible & Remote-First Culture: Work remotely with team meetup opportunities, bi-annual destination summits, and a monthly stipend for coworking spaces, phone and internet costs.
• Our Approach to Equity: Receive stock options upon hire and promotion. Plus, you can participate in secondary offerings and have 10 years to exercise your options (yes, you read that correctly: 10 years!).
• 100% Covered Health Insurance: We cover 100% of your health, vision and dental insurance premiums for you and your dependents. Nothing comes out of your paycheck.
• ∞ Flexible Time Off: Take the time you need – to do our best work, we need to recharge and reset.
• 18 Weeks Paid Parental Leave: We offer 18 weeks for birthing parents and 12 weeks for non-birthing parents, with the option to use it all at once or throughout your child's first year.
• For a full list of our benefits and rewards, click here.

If your experience is close but doesn’t fulfill all requirements, please apply. We’re building the best team in technology and are focused on hiring “Chainguardians'' with unique backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences.

Chainguard is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive health decisions, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, political views or activity, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law.

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