Sales Engineer Lead
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Description
As the Sales Engineer Lead at ZeroKey, you will own the technical side of how we win. Reporting to the Director of Global Sales, you'll lead pre-sales engineering across our most important opportunities and build the sales engineering practice itself, including the demos, playbooks, tools, and eventually the team. You will play an integral role from first technical discovery through solution design, live demonstrations, pilot deployments, and the handoff to Customer Success. The role calls for deep technical credibility in industrial environments, composure when the demo is live and the room is skeptical, and the builder's instinct to turn every win into a repeatable motion. You are the engineer buyers trust and reps fight to get into their deals, and you'd rather prove a claim on the customer's floor than assert it on a slide.
Location and Work Model
This role is based on-site at our Calgary headquarters and manufacturing facility, where you'll have direct access to our hardware, demo environments, and the engineering team, balanced with significant travel to customer sites worldwide. Relocation support may be available for exceptional candidates.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead technical discovery on qualified opportunities: map the customer's process, environment, and integration landscape to the right ZeroKey solution.
- Design solution architectures for customer sites (coverage planning, anchor and mobile placement, infrastructure requirements, and integration approach) that deployment teams can execute as designed.
- Deliver compelling product demonstrations at our Calgary HQ, on customer floors, and at industry events, tuned to each audience from plant engineers to executives.
- Scope, run, and land pilot deployments: set success criteria up front, execute cleanly, and deliver results the customer's own stakeholders will champion internally.
- Own technical responses to RFPs, RFIs, and security/IT reviews, with accuracy that survives procurement scrutiny.
- Partner with sales reps and channel partners as the technical lead on deals, and enable partner engineers to represent the product correctly.
- Work with Product Management and Engineering to pressure-test roadmap decisions against real deals, and relay field-discovered gaps, edge cases, and integration needs.
- Build the sales engineering practice: demo environments and kits, evaluation playbooks, sizing and proposal tools, and reference architectures.
- Support the transition of closed deals to the Customer Success and Deployment teams with complete, accurate technical documentation.
- Hire, mentor, and develop sales engineers as the team grows.
- Stay current on RTLS, positioning, industrial integration (MES, PLC, robotics), and industrial AI developments to keep our technical sales motion ahead of the market.
Skills, Knowledge and Expertise
Education and Experience:
- A Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field is required.
- At least 7 years of experience in sales engineering, solutions engineering, or field applications engineering with complex technical products, including industrial or hardware-inclusive solutions.
Requirements:
- A proven track record of technical wins in long-cycle, multi-stakeholder B2B sales.
- Comfortable working hands-on in manufacturing environments: plant floors, IT/OT constraints, safety protocols, and the realities of complex installations.
- Working fluency with integration technologies: REST APIs, networking fundamentals, and scripting (e.g., Python) for demos and proofs of concept.
- Willingness to travel significantly to customer sites, including internationally.
- Excellent problem-solving skills and the ability to work collaboratively in a team environment.
- Strong communication skills to effectively convey complex concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Considered an asset:
- Experience with RTLS, positioning, sensors, machine vision, or industrial automation.
- Experience integrating with MES, ERP, PLC/SCADA, or robotics systems.
- Experience building or leading a pre-sales function.
Benefits
- Stock options
- Extended health, dental, and vision care, plus life and disability insurance
- Paid time off, on-site parking at our Calgary HQ, and casual dress
- Company events and a team that is genuinely fun to work with
ZeroKey is building the spatial data layer for Physical AI.
AI transformed the digital economy by capturing every keystroke as data. The physical economy has no equivalent. On a factory floor, every human action, material movement, tool motion, and assembly step is invisible to software, and therefore to AI. We close that gap.
Our patented Quantum RTLS® (35+ patents) is the industry’s most accurate large-scale 3D real-time location system. Using ultrasound instead of cameras, it tracks people, tools, robots, and materials across entire factories with an accuracy of 1.5 millimetres, which is over 100 times more precise than anything else on the market.
That precision is the foundation of something bigger. The spatial data from Quantum RTLS feeds OmniVisor AI™, our agentic platform that puts a dedicated AI process engineer in every work cell. Together, our two technologies process 3.3 billion positions every month and prevent more than 1.1 million production errors every year.
Production accuracy is ultimately a safety story. Automotive and aerospace OEMs trust ZeroKey to verify safety-critical assemblies, torque by torque and step by step, down to the millimetre. The buses and planes they build carry every passenger safely to their destination. Those passengers will never know our name. That is the point.
Venture-backed, headquartered in Calgary, and winner of the 16th Innovation World Cup (2025), ZeroKey is deployed by 250+ customers across 41 countries, including roughly 1 in 10 Fortune Global 500 companies.
See it in action: