Senior Sales Engineer (Chicago)

About Glia

Glia is the leading AI customer service solution for banks and credit unions. Our platform unifies AI and human agents across every voice and digital conversation through our proprietary ChannelLess® Architecture. With AI for All™, organizations overcome the tradeoff between efficiency and experience by using AI to automate conversations and elevate service operations.

Valued at over $1 billion and named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ company for five consecutive years, Glia powers over 700 financial institutions and maintains an industry-leading 72 NPS. We're also certified as a Great Place to Work, with 98% employee satisfaction.

The Role

We are seeking a Senior Sales Engineer who thrives in complex and dynamic environments. This candidate will bring deep technical expertise combined with strategic thinking to our sales team. This role involves engaging with banks, credit unions, and other financial services institutions, guiding them through their digital transformation journeys with Glia's digital and voice AI solutions. The ideal candidate is a seasoned, proactive problem-solver who excels in a collaborative setting and can lead complex deals, projects, and cross-functional teams effectively.

This position serves as the senior technical expert and trusted advisor supporting prospects from initial engagement through to successful final sales. The role offers a dynamic mix of strategic technical sales, proof of concept leadership, and ongoing technical guidance, providing a varied set of daily activities with our prospects across the financial services industry.

What You'll Do:

• Lead and resolve complex technical challenges independently, leveraging managers and teams as strategic partners rather than primary support.

• Serve as a subject matter expert in API data integrations and across the Glia product suite.

• Develop and implement risk mitigation strategies to proactively address potential risks and minimize their impact on sales outcomes.

• Delegate tasks appropriately, integrate technical needs into project planning, and choose the most effective project management strategies.

• Navigate and resolve complex client issues, fostering collaboration across departments and managing communication challenges with diverse stakeholders at banks, credit unions, and financial services organizations.

• Present complex information clearly and concisely during executive-level meetings, ensuring all communications are impactful and directly support business objectives.

• Maintain a deep understanding of financial services and customer service industry trends, regularly contributing insights in meetings and strategic discussions.

• Develop and maintain deep, personalized customer relationships, leveraging those to advance business objectives.

• Mentor peers and contribute to the team's collective knowledge by effectively utilizing our entire library of stories and case studies across the Glia product set.

Qualifications:

Must Have:

• 5+ years of experience in a pre-sales engineering, solutions engineering, solutions architecture, or comparable customer-facing technical role.

• Hands-on coding ability (not just "technical aptitude"). Comfortable building and modifying working examples in JavaScript and HTML/CSS, and explaining decisions clearly.

• Proven experience working with REST APIs, webhooks, and event-driven integrations (authentication, payloads, retries, error handling, debugging).

• Track record of building real technical artifacts such as serverless functions, lightweight backend services, automation scripts, or integration applets to prove out workflows and solutions in enterprise sales cycles.

• Ability to translate technical concepts into business outcomes and guide technical + non-technical stakeholders through tradeoffs (security, time-to-value, maintainability, UX).

• Substantial customer-facing / business-facing experience (pre-sales, professional services, implementations, solutions architecture, technical consulting, or similar). Must be comfortable leading technical conversations with senior prospect stakeholders, including executive buyers.

• Strong communication skills: asks great questions, can whiteboard/teach, and can present a clear point of view with executive presence.

• Experience working in/around B2B SaaS products that support sales/service/customer experience workflows (understands customer service personas and care team operational realities).

Nice to Have:

• Prior Senior Sales Engineer / Senior Solutions Engineer / Solutions Architect title or demo/POC ownership experience on complex enterprise deals.

• Experience selling to or working with banks, credit unions, or other financial services institutions.

• CS degree or formal technical training (helpful, not required if the hands-no dev skills are strong).

• Experience with customer service / CX tech and/or telephony/SIP/VoIP concepts (bonus, not required).

• Background at orgs known for platform / custom development pre-sales (e.g., large enterprise software vendors with platform SE teams).

Benefits:

• Stock options and competitive salary

• Professional development support (trainings, courses, conferences, books, etc.)

• Access to all the latest tools and equipment you'll need

• Sports compensation, reimbursement for therapy, counseling sessions

• Team events: annual employee awards, internal hackathons, and a dozen cool events from cooking to the Glia olympic games :)

• Diversity: 25 countries represented

Glia is an equal-opportunity employer. Glia does not discriminate against any employee or applicant because of race, creed, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression, national origin, disability, age, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, pregnancy or related condition (including breastfeeding), or any other basis protected by law.

The Glia Talent Acquisition team uses @glia.com and @gliatalent.com email addresses for coordinating interviews, providing updates, and sending documents.

Our hiring process involves an introduction, practical and team interviews, and a decision and offer. For more information, visit our Recruitment Privacy Notice page or contact our talent team via [email protected]