Head of Solutions Engineering

Laravel is the most popular PHP framework in the world. 500M+ lifetime downloads. Thousands of packages. A developer community that shows up — at conferences, in forums, on Twitter, in Discord servers, in every "what framework should I use?" thread on the internet.

But Laravel is more than a framework. It's a complete platform — from choosing a stack, to building an app, to deploying it, monitoring it, and scaling it. 8 paid products, 20+ open source packages, one customer journey. When enterprise teams evaluate Laravel's commercial products, they're evaluating the whole platform. The SE team is how we earn their trust and prove the technical fit.

We have a small, talented SE team doing great work. Now we're adding the leader who sets the direction, hires the team, designs the processes, and owns how we approach pre-sales in the AI era. There is no playbook. You're writing it.

Why This Job is Unique

You'll inherit two SEs and scale the team over the next couple of years. You'll define what "great" looks like for SEs at Laravel, build the hiring process to find those people, and create the onboarding and coaching programs that develop them. Most SE Manager roles hand you an existing org and ask you to optimize it. This one hands you a blank canvas.

AI-native is the mandate, not the buzzword. Every process, every deliverable, every workflow gets questioned from first principles. We want someone who looks at the way SEs have traditionally operated and thinks "what if we rebuilt this entirely?" What inputs do we need to collect? What can AI generate that meets our quality bar? Where do we keep humans in the loop? This is yours to own.

Your team will be the bridge between EPD and GTM. The product team wants technical feedback from the field. Your team's insights from customer conversations will shape what gets built — and an automation-first approach to capturing that signal will make the data impossible to ignore.

Technical credibility matters here. Our customers are developers and engineering teams who know our product deeply. They can smell inauthenticity from a mile away. You don't need to be the smartest engineer in the room — but you need to earn the trust of the people who are.

What the SE Manager Will Do

Build and scale the team. Recruit, interview, and close great customer-facing technical talent — while maintaining an extremely high hiring bar. Set the standards and create the onboarding programs that set people up to succeed.

Design the SE operating system. Build stage-appropriate processes and infrastructure that make the SE team effective and efficient at scale. Discovery frameworks, engagement models, deliverable workflows, capacity planning — all of it, with an automation-first mindset.

Coach and develop. Run deal reviews, give direct feedback, and invest deeply in the growth of every person on the team. Hold a high bar and help people reach it. Have hard conversations directly and compassionately.

Partner across the org. Work shoulder-to-shoulder with AEs, product, engineering, and customer success. The AE-SE relationship here is a true partnership — your closest partners will be on the sales team, and they'll expect you to show up as a peer.

Requirements:
What the Ideal Candidate Brings

• Experience standing something up from scratch. You've hired the people, designed the processes, and defined the culture — not just inherited a team and kept it running.
• A practical AI vision. You can design the pipeline from input collection to AI-generated deliverable to human review. Systems thinking, not buzzwords.
• Technical credibility. You can engage in a technical conversation without deferring everything to an engineer. You know how to position technical products to technical audiences.
• A collaborative mindset. You view AEs as partners. You understand that SE success and sales success are the same thing.
• Recruiting instincts. You have a clear philosophy on what "great" looks like in an SE and a track record of finding and developing those people.
• Comfort with ambiguity. You thrive in early-stage environments. You don't need someone to hand you a strategy before you start shipping.

Who This is Not For

Someone whose experience is exclusively optimizing existing teams. This role requires someone who has recruited the first hires, written the first processes, and defined the culture from zero.

Someone who thinks AI in pre-sales means "use ChatGPT sometimes." We want first-principles thinking about how the SE function should work when AI can generate customer deliverables at scale. If you can't articulate a specific, practical vision for that, this isn't the role.

Someone who views the SE org as a service desk. If your instinct is to build walls between SE and sales rather than partnerships, this won't work.

Someone who needs everything defined before they start. If ambiguity sounds stressful rather than exciting, this isn't the right fit.

Someone who wants to stay in deals all day. This is a leadership role. You'll spend your time hiring, coaching, and scaling the org — not running individual POCs.

Benefits:
• Health Coverage (Medical, Dental & Vision)
• 401(k) with Company Match
• PTO + Paid Holidays
• Parental Leave
• Work from Home
• Stock Options