Senior Director of Solution Engineering, EMEA

About the role

Reporting to the Global VP of Pre-Sales, you are responsible for the performance and development of the Pre-Sales (Solution Engineering) team across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.  Aligned to the Solution & Services division you will be responsible for executing on the Global Pre-Sales vision for your geo. The Pre-Sales (Solution Engineering) is an organization of technical Pre-Sales engineers focused on helping our customers adopt and derive value from their Cloudflare subscriptions.  The team is currently over 70 strong across several countries across Europe, Middle East, and Africa. The team supports Mid Market and Strategic Pre-Sales, Customer Success and Partner organizations amongst others.  The team works cross functionally: not only helping our customers land and expand, but also helping Cloudflare develop and test new products, and acting as advisors across the organization. Team building and scaling to 100 and beyond are core components of this role, along with coaching and empowering both Pre-Sales Managers and high performing individual contributors. As a leader, you should embody the core values we strive for: humility, curiosity, and empathy.

Working with your direct reports, you will take care of new team members and you will ensure work loads are effectively distributed. You are kind, personable, and great at providing constructive feedback. You will help escalate and identify issues quickly and efficiently and you will work with the other cross functional leads to ensure regional coordination with the Pre-Sales heads for APJC and AMER.

You will develop superb working relationships with Sales and Customer Success leadership, working together to drive the long term success of Cloudflare’s EMEA business.

You will also work closely with every team at Cloudflare, from Sales and Product, through to Engineering and Customer Support. Your goal of customer success should drive you through the entire organization as you seek out and advise your team on how to create scalable solutions for your customer’s needs.

Available Locations: You may be based in London. Münich, Paris, Lisbon, Amsterdam or remotely in any of these five corresponding countries.

Examples of desirable skills, knowledge, experience and goals

Our Pre-Sales (Solution Engineering) come from a wide range of backgrounds: financial consulting, engineering, software development, product management, customer support & project delivery. We're serious about building a diverse team. When hiring we look for diversity of experience combined with genuine curiosity for our technology.

This is a senior role that requires strong management experience but ultimately, you are passionate about technology, have the ability to explain complex technical concepts in easy-to-understand terms, and you excel at coaching and teaching. You are naturally curious, and an avid builder who is not afraid to get your hands dirty. On the Pre-Sales (Solution Engineering) team, you will find a collaborative environment where everyone brings different strengths and jumps in to help each other and you will be an integral part of driving that culture.

Requirements

• Technology or related background ideally in the same or similar fields as Cloudflare;
• Experience managing teams within a customer facing organization. Both pre and post sales is a plus
• Demonstrable experience in coaching, leadership skills or team management within organizations with manager of managers responsibilities
• Demonstrable experience in understanding and solving escalations, team issues or other management related scenarios
• Demonstrable experience of leading with a vision and mission statement, looking for efficiencies and ability to execute long term goals and objectives while inspiring confidence in the team
• Demonstrable experience speaking to larger audiences is a plus

Inter-Team Goals

• Cultivate cross Pre-Sales team/company coordination, keep us all connected as one team
• Facilitate knowledge transfer between Pre-Sales teams and regions
• Develop strong relationships outside of Pre-Sales organization to aid in escalation of issues (product/support/engineering/special projects/marketing/legal/etc)
• Maintain strong communications with Account Executives and Customer Success regional leads

Intra-Team Goals

• Keep the pulse of the team: who is happy, productive, performing. Know each member’s strengths and how they would each like to develop
• Develop leadership skills of Pre-Sales managers
• Exemplify and cultivate positive culture traits
• Provide support and confidence to team managers and members
• Cultivate a very open communication environment. Criticism is welcome and appreciated
• Maintain culture of independence amongst team managers and members while offering advice on how to improve