Sales Engineering Director Europe IAM

Location: Amersfoort DIS, Netherlands

Position Summary

The Sales Engineer Director IAM Europe is a senior leadership role responsible for leading, developing, and upscaling a geographically distributed team of Sales Engineers (SEs) supporting Thales Identity & Access Management (IAM) solutions across Europe.

This role ensures the Sales Engineering organization operates as a cohesive, high-performing team aligned with regional sales priorities. The Director is accountable for upskilling technical engineers into effective, customer-facing Sales Engineers, driving consistent adoption of sales methodologies, and ensuring all SEs are fully cross-trained and enabled across the three IAM solutions offered by Thales.

The Sales Engineer Director works closely with Sales Leadership, Product Management, and Global Sales Engineering teams to enable revenue growth, improve deal quality, and strengthen Thales IAM’s technical credibility in the field. This position plays a critical role in scaling the European IAM business by building a world-class, commercially minded Sales Engineering organization.
 

Essential Functions / Key Areas of Responsibility          
                           

• Lead, coach, and manage a distributed team of IAM Sales Engineers across multiple European countries, fostering ownership, collaboration, consistency, and high performance.
• Drive the professional development and upskilling of the Sales Engineering organization, with a strong focus on transitioning engineers into commercially aware, customer-facing Sales Engineers.
• Ensure all Sales Engineers are cross-trained, enabled, and regularly validated on all three Thales IAM solutions, allowing for flexible deployment and consistent customer messaging.
• Establish, standardize, and enforce common Sales Engineering processes, methodologies, tools, and best practices across the region, aligned with global standards.
• Partner closely with Regional Sales Directors, Regional Sales Managers and Partner Managers to support strategic opportunities, account planning, pipeline development and deal execution.
• Provide senior-level technical leadership in complex or strategic customer engagements, including architecture discussions, value-based positioning, and competitive differentiation.
• Collaborate with Product Management and Global Sales Engineering teams to ensure timely field enablement on new releases, product roadmaps, and solution positioning.
• Own Sales Engineering capacity planning, territory alignment, and resource allocation to ensure optimal coverage of strategic accounts and priority opportunities together with sales leadership.
• Define, track, and manage Sales Engineering performance using clear KPIs, including opportunity support quality, win rates, customer feedback, and enablement progress.
• Recruit, onboard, and retain top Sales Engineering talent, building a diverse, scalable and future-ready organization across Europe.
• Act as a senior escalation point for technical, solution, or customer-related challenges, ensuring alignment between Sales, Engineering, and Product teams.
• Detect and provide market trends to Product Management.
 

Minimum Requirements: Skills, Experience, Education, Technical/Specialized Knowledge, Certifications, Language

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Security, or equivalent professional experience.

• Extensive experience (10+ years) in Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, or Technical Pre-Sales roles within enterprise software, cybersecurity, preferably IAM.
• Proven leadership experience managing and developing Sales Engineering or technical pre-sales teams in a multi-country environment.
• Strong understanding of Identity & Access Management concepts, including IAM architectures, CIAM and Access Management.
• Strong commercial mindset with the ability to translate technical capabilities into clear business value for customers.
• Excellent leadership, coaching, and communication skills, with the ability to influence senior internal and external stakeholders.
• Experience working in a matrixed, international organization with geographically distributed teams.
• Willingness and ability to travel within Europe as required.
• Fluent in English.
 

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with Thales IAM/CIAM solutions or comparable (Customer) Identity & Access Management platforms.
• Proven experience transforming technical engineers into high-impact, customer-facing Sales Engineers.
• Experience supporting enterprise and strategic accounts, particularly within regulated industries.
• Additional European language(s).
• Familiarity with modern sales methodologies and value-based selling frameworks.
• Experience working closely with Product Management and R&D teams to provide structured field feedback and influence product roadmaps.