Desirable Skills, Knowledge, and Experience
Experience: Experience in a customer-facing technical role, such as Solutions Engineering, Customer Engineering, Professional Services, Sales Engineering, Technical Account Management, or as a Forward Deployed Engineer (years of experience required will vary based on Associate, Senior, Staff, or Principal leveling). Experience working with startups, AI companies, digital-native businesses, or as part of a startup engineering team is strongly valued.
Startup Ecosystem Network: An established network within incubators, accelerators, venture capital, and the broader startup scene is highly desirable, along with the drive to take on business development activities and open doors to new relationships.
Architectural Mindset: Ability to white-board, design, and articulate complex enterprise, startup, AI application, agent, network, and security architectures clearly.
Consultative & Advisory Skills: Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate deeply technical concepts into business outcomes for both hands-on engineers and C-level executives, founders, and technical leaders.
Commercial Mindset: Proven track record of operating in a quota-carrying or revenue-aligned environment, with a strong understanding of SaaS metrics, business value translation, and enterprise, mid-market, or startup sales cycles.
Communication: Exceptional presentation and stakeholder management skills, capable of bridging the gap between deep technical implementation details and high-level C-suite business strategy. Business fluency in German is required.
Technical Breadth: We do not expect every candidate to be an expert in every domain. Qualified candidates will demonstrate depth in at least four of the technical areas below:
- Internet fundamentals: Deep understanding of how the Internet works, including OSI Model layers 1–7, BGP, GRE, TCP/UDP, DNS (authoritative and recursive), HTTP(S), and SSL/TLS.
- Security: Expertise in the security of Internet properties, including WAF, Bot Management, Firewalls, Rate Limiting, (M)TLS, Zero Trust, and SASE concepts.
- Performance: Expertise in the performance of Internet properties, including speed, latency, caching, video streaming, HTTP/2, and TLS 1.3.
- AI Engineering: Solid grounding in AI model fundamentals (model size, context length, reasoning models, fine-tuning versus prompting, and matching the right model to the job). Familiarity with common agent patterns, including knowing when a simple workflow beats an agent, and with open agent frameworks and standards such as MCP. Understanding of how to evaluate and operate AI systems in production.
- AI-Augmented Workflows: Familiarity with prompt engineering, building prototypes with coding agents, AI-assisted scripting and log analysis, and workflow automation to augment everyday CE workflows.
- Coding/Scripting: Proficiency in Python, JavaScript, Bash, Lua, Go, or similar languages to write custom integration scripts, API connectors, and edge computing functions.
- Developer Platform Fluency: Experience designing, building, deploying or scaling applications using RESTful/GraphQL APIs, SDKs, webhooks, and developer tooling in cloud-native environments. Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi), CI/CD pipelines, and observability for developer-led deployments.
Bonus Points
- Technical Enablement: Track record of creating and delivering technical enablement (workshops, code samples, documentation, or developer onboarding) that accelerates customer adoption of complex platforms.
- Applied AI Knowledge: Hands-on experience with retrieval and knowledge systems (RAG, embeddings, reranking, agentic search), domain adaptation through lightweight fine-tuning, sandboxed execution environments for agents that write and run code, LLM orchestration, or model-access controls.
- AI Traffic & the Agentic Web: Understanding of how AI crawlers and agents interact with internet-facing applications: protecting AI endpoints, managing bot and agent access, and exposing services to agents.
- Regulatory Knowledge: Understanding of regulatory requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, and the EU AI Act.
- Hyperscaler / Digital Native / Startup Background: Talent coming out of hyperscalers, digital natives, distributed systems environments, or startups is strongly valued for its deeper cloud fluency, advanced architecture depth, and ability to operate effectively in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.