Engineering to Sales Engineer Transition?
I’ve been a software engineer for 4 years, ever since graduating, and I’d like to transition into Sales Engineering. Let’s assume I have the soft skills to make the transition. Will recruiters consider a Software Engineer with no prior experience for a Sales Engineering role? If I got a Sales Engineer job what would be a realistic salary to expect? Any companies where they like software guys for their sales engineering positions? Location: SF FY19 expected TC: $270k
Sales engineers are salary & commission based. Typically 75/25, where 75% is base and 25% is commission. The commission is based on your alignment. It can be aligned to reps your support or overall territory/group. I've heard the sales engineers that do great is because they're aligned to a killer rep that blows their quota out of the water. These are rare.
Yes it is definitely possible to transition, especially if the product/service is utilized by developers, devOps, or scrum teams. You would bring credibility since you actually understand their pain points. With that said Sales Engineers comp varies a lot. 150K is pretty common. My friend works for Salesforce. The title there is Solutions Engineer. He doesn’t have a quota, and his TC is in the 200K range but I doubt it is as high as your current 270K. You might get that and more if you work for AWS and they throw in stock. At Microsoft an equivalent title would be a TSP. I was recruited for that in 2016 for Azure but didn’t get past 2nd round because the guy interviewing me wanted me to have experience working as an actual DBA. You can check out angelList for gigs at startups and they’ll tell you the salary. Good luck!
Did you switch ?
I don’t know why anyone would want to leave a guaranteed tc structure to quota based. Especially in an environment where a recession is expected in next couple of years.