2026-07-01
Solutions Engineer: 2,396 open roles, $175k median — the customer-facing technical role that AI companies can't scale without
2,396 open Solutions Engineer roles. 756 companies. Median $175.75k USD. The SE market in July 2026 — from live ATS data.
AI products are complex to evaluate, configure, and deploy. That's why Solutions Engineers exist. They're the technical layer between the sales motion and the customer's production environment — and as AI products get more complex, the SE role gets more important.
I track Solutions Engineer roles daily from public ATS feeds. Here's July 2026.
What Solutions Engineers do
Solutions Engineer (SE) is the go-to-market technical role that demos, configures, and technically validates products for prospective customers. The job requires two things: genuine technical depth (enough to answer hard integration questions and run custom demos), and customer-facing communication skills (enough to work directly with CIOs, engineering leads, and technical evaluators).
SE is often confused with Sales Engineer (sometimes used synonymously) and Solutions Architect (which typically implies post-sales or design work). In practice, SEs are the people who own the technical side of the deal: discovery calls, proof-of-concept builds, RFP responses, and technical objection handling.
The AI era has made the SE role more technically demanding. Enterprise buyers now ask detailed questions about data privacy, API rate limits, model fine-tuning options, integration security, and compliance. A weak SE loses deals that a stronger one would have won.
The data: 2,396 open SE roles across 756 companies
2,396 active roles. 756 companies. 340 new roles in the last 7 days.
340 new openings per week is high velocity for a market of this size — 14% weekly growth. Companies are building out SE teams faster than they're filling them.
Who's hiring most aggressively
| Company | Open SE roles |
|---|---|
| Zscaler | 61 |
| Cisco | 57 |
| Databricks | 57 |
| CompuNet | 55 |
| Cloudflare | 47 |
| Datadog | 47 |
| Samsara | 34 |
The top of the list is the B2B security, networking, and AI infrastructure category. Zscaler, Cisco, Cloudflare, Datadog — these are large enterprise SaaS companies with complex products, large sales teams, and high SE-to-AE ratios. Databricks at 57 reflects their aggressive enterprise expansion; every new Databricks enterprise deal requires an SE to validate the data architecture.
CompuNet at 55 is a technology solution provider (VAR/reseller) — their SE demand aggregates across many vendor solutions and customer engagements.
Samsara at 34 is a notable entrant — an IoT/fleet management company that has built a serious enterprise sales motion and needs SEs to support it.
What they pay
Of 2,396 roles, 944 (39.4%) have a published salary range — the second-highest disclosure rate in our database. Among USD roles:
- Median: $175,750/year
- 25th percentile: $137,500
- 75th percentile: $205,000
$175.75k median with a $67.5k spread. The P25 ($137.5k) is lower than other technical roles because SE comp structures often include a variable component (commissions, deal bonuses) that doesn't show up in base salary ranges — the OTE for a senior SE at Databricks or Cloudflare is typically $220k–$280k+.
The 39.4% salary disclosure rate reflects that B2B SaaS is one of the most salary-transparent sectors, and SE is a role that benefits from transparency in competitive hiring markets.
Freshness: 340 new roles in 7 days
340 per week puts Solutions Engineering among the fastest-growing markets we track by absolute weekly volume, behind only Data Engineering and DevOps/SRE.
What this tells us about the SE market
1. The top 7 companies account for ~358 of 2,396 roles — 15% of the market. If you're targeting an SE role, Zscaler, Cisco, Databricks, Cloudflare, and Datadog are running structured, well-resourced SE organisations with clear career tracks. Significant concentration at the top.
2. The real comp is higher than the base salary range. 39.4% of roles publish salary, and the median is $175.75k — but most SE roles have OTE structures. The published number is the base; total compensation at enterprise SaaS companies is typically 30-50% higher including variable. Factor this into comparisons.
3. AI infrastructure companies are building the largest SE teams. Databricks and Cloudflare both appear in the top 5. As enterprise AI adoption accelerates, the companies that provide the infrastructure layer (data platforms, security, observability) need SEs who can speak to both the AI use case and the underlying technical architecture. "SE with AI/ML infrastructure knowledge" is the premium sub-role.
4. 756 companies means real breadth. Unlike Solutions Architect (357 companies), the SE market is more distributed. You can find SE roles across fintech, healthcare, logistics, retail, and government — not just cloud-native SaaS. This breadth creates more optionality around sector and deal complexity.
The board
latchhire.com/board/solutions_eng — updated daily. Every role links to the original posting.
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Data pulled 2026-07-01. Active roles only. Salary USD only. "New in 7d" = first seen in the past 7 days.