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(Pre-Sales Engineer, Sales Engineer, Technical Sales Engineer, ICT Pre-Sales Engineer)
IT & Data
Salary
€45,000 - €95,000/yr
Level
Professional
Outlook
Growing
Sector
IT & Data
As a Solutions Engineer you act as the bridge between a technology company's sales team and its technical departments, helping prospective clients understand how a product or platform can solve their specific business problems. You design and deliver technical demonstrations, build proofs of concept, and respond to detailed technical queries during the sales process. Your days typically involve collaborating with account executives, product managers, and engineers, as well as meeting directly with client technical teams to assess their requirements and propose tailored configurations. You also contribute to proposals, tender responses, and documentation that supports the wider commercial team.
Listen: a day as a Solutions Engineer
You arrive at your company's Dublin city-centre office at half eight, grab a coffee, and open your laptop to check overnight emails. A prospect based in Cork has sent through a list of follow-up questions about API authentication after yesterday's demonstration. You paste them into a shared document so the product team can review them later, then join a nine o'clock stand-up call with the account executive and two colleagues from the engineering department. The four of you agree on who owns which action before an eleven o'clock client meeting. The client meeting runs on Zoom. The company is a mid-sized Irish financial services firm and their head of IT wants to know whether your platform can integrate with their existing data warehouse. You screen-share a pre-built proof of concept — a working sample environment you spent two hours configuring yesterday afternoon — and walk them through it step by step, translating technical detail into plain language for the business stakeholders who are also on the call. One stakeholder asks something you cannot answer with certainty, so you note it down rather than guess.
A Level 8 Honours Bachelor degree is the typical minimum for this role, with relevant disciplines including Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or Business Information Systems — offered at institutions such as UCD, DCU, TU Dublin, and University of Limerick. Leaving Certificate subjects such as Maths, Physics, and Business are particularly useful preparation. Some candidates enter through a Level 7 Ordinary Bachelor degree and build experience before moving into a solutions engineering function. There is no statutory professional registration requirement for this role, though membership of Engineers Ireland or relevant vendor certifications (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Salesforce) are highly valued by Irish employers and often expected as you progress.
Most Solutions Engineers begin their careers in a technical support, software development, or junior sales engineering role, building both product knowledge and client-facing confidence. With two to four years of experience you would typically move into a fully independent Solutions Engineer position, owning complex deals and managing client relationships through the full pre-sales cycle. Senior Solutions Engineers in Ireland often progress into Principal or Lead roles, or move into product management, solutions architecture, or technical sales management. Some transition into broader business development or regional pre-sales leadership positions, particularly within the many multinational technology companies headquartered in Dublin.
AI tools are increasingly automating routine elements of the pre-sales process, such as generating first-draft proposals, summarising customer requirements, and producing standard demonstration scripts. This frees Solutions Engineers to focus on higher-value activities including complex architecture discussions, bespoke proof-of-concept builds, and relationship management. At the same time, AI itself is becoming a core part of the product portfolio many Solutions Engineers must understand and demonstrate, requiring continuous upskilling. Overall, AI is likely to make the role more strategic rather than replacing it, as human judgement and client trust remain essential to closing significant technology deals.
→ Solutions Engineer (Current role)
Organisations in Ireland that employ people in this occupation.
Dublin City Centre
Demo CRM platform to enterprise prospects across EMEA region
Dublin 2
Support sales cycles with technical demos for marketing software clients
Dublin, Co. Dublin
Deliver cybersecurity solution demonstrations to prospective enterprise customers
Dublin City Centre
Build data lakehouse proofs of concept for Irish and EMEA clients
Dublin 2
Bridge sales and engineering teams for customer messaging platform deals
Dublin City Centre
Architect cloud solutions and run technical workshops for enterprise prospects
Dublin, Co. Dublin
Present NoSQL database capabilities and build client-specific proofs of concept
Dublin, Belfast, Nationwide
Advise clients on technology solutions across cloud, data and ERP
Dublin City Centre
Design and present IT infrastructure and cloud solutions to Irish businesses
Dublin City Centre
Support data cloud sales with technical demonstrations and PoCs
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