Pre-sales Engineer
- Role
- Sales
- Experience
- Senior
- Employment
- Full-time
- Company size
- Startup
Open to Anywhere in EU + GB. Set where you work from to check your eligibility.
No BS summary
Senior pre-sales / solutions engineering IC with 5+ years selling or delivering into enterprise operations, IT, or finance buyers. Must be hands-on with LLMs/agentic workflows, APIs, JSON, webhooks, SQL, and light Python or JavaScript. EU/UK-based remote role with fluent English and customer-site travel.
Core skills
Required skills
Required languages
About Duvo
Duvo helps large retailers and consumer-goods companies redesign and automate the operational processes that sit between systems and teams. Our agents execute the work end to end across ERPs, portals, inboxes, spreadsheets and phone calls, write the result back to the system of record, and provide evidence of what changed.
Our customers include one of Europe's largest online grocery retailers, a global beauty e-commerce brand, a Middle East retail group, and a European pharmacy chain. The buyer is usually a Head of Operations, Supply Chain, Finance or IT at a large retailer or FMCG brand. New deals land at €100k-€250k ARR.
About the role
Enterprise operations still depend on people moving work across ERPs, portals, spreadsheets, email, and phone calls. Duvo maps how these workflows really operate, redesigns the process, and uses AI agents to run the better version end to end — working through APIs and secure browser sessions, requesting approval when needed, writing verified changes back to core systems, and producing proof of what happened.
We focus on complex operational workflows in retail and consumer goods: supply chain, procurement, category management, merchandising, finance, and supplier management. Duvo raised a $15M seed round led by Index Ventures, with Northzone and Credo Ventures participating.
We're growing the pre-sales team to keep pace with demand — you'll join an existing team, working closely with Account Executives in your region.
This role sits between sales and engineering. You own the technical story in a deal, run the workshops with the customer's ops and IT people, and design the pilot that gets us from "this looks interesting" to a signed contract. You work closely with Account Executives in your region, report directly to Tom, and hand off cleanly to Forward Deployed Engineering once a pilot is signed.
This is a senior individual contributor role — you won't have direct reports, but you'll shape the pre-sales playbook the team runs on.
What you'll do
- Run discovery and process mapping with customer teams — systems, handoffs, exceptions, approvals — and turn it into a pilot scope with a clear Definition of Done.
- Connect the proposed solution to measurable business outcomes: margin, availability, working capital, revenue, or cycle time.
- Build and demo pilots against the customer's own workflow, data shape, approval rules, and write-back targets. No generic decks.
- Own the technical evaluation: security review, integration sizing, RFPs, architecture questions, and IT objections. Bring in Product or Engineering only when you genuinely need them.
- Guide customers through early platform testing — kickoffs, first workflow captures, and resolving issues before they stall the evaluation.
- Push back on scope, timelines, or success metrics that won't work — good judgment beats saying yes.
- Stay in the deal through pilot delivery, then hand it over cleanly to Forward Deployed Engineering so what was sold is what gets built.
- Build reusable demo assets, runbooks, and discovery patterns that make the whole team faster.
Who you are
- 5+ years in pre-sales, solutions engineering, applied AI, enterprise automation, or forward-deployed work, selling or delivering into enterprise operations, IT, or finance buyers. Retail or consumer goods experience is a plus.
- Hands-on with modern AI systems — LLMs, agentic workflows, tool use, evaluation, and their practical limits — not just conversant in the concepts.
- Strong process discovery and systems thinking — you can understand an unfamiliar operation and find the leverage points.
- Comfortable with APIs, JSON, webhooks, SQL, and light Python or JavaScript. You don't need to be a software engineer, but you can investigate and prototype.
- Strong commercial judgment — you qualify use cases, size value, spot a buying signal, and know when to escalate.
- Excellent communication — you shift altitude quickly between operators, architects, and executives, and explain complex systems in plain English.
- A track record of crisp, discovery-led demos rather than long product monologues.
- Fluent English. Willingness to travel to customer sites.
You'll thrive here if you're
- Customer-obsessed, commercially aware, and comfortable operating in ambiguity.
- Fast and hands-on — you build the proof instead of waiting for a perfect spec.
- Low ego, high standards — you listen closely and change your view when the evidence changes.
- Honest about feasibility and risk, even when the answer is uncomfortable.
- Calm under pressure when a live demo or integration doesn't behave as expected
What we offer
- Competitive salary and equity. We share the range on the first call.
- Seed-stage company backed by Index Ventures ($15M seed). Our founder and CEO is Tom Cupr, who previously founded one of Europe's largest online grocery retailers.
- You're the first pre-sales hire in your region. The function is yours to build.
- Remote across Europe / the US, with travel to customer sites in your region and a team offsite once a quarter.
How we hire
- Recruiter screen
- Hiring manager interview
- Practical discovery
- Final round
We aim to close the process in under three weeks.
If this is the kind of problem you want to spend your time on, get in touch.
What you'll do
- Run discovery and process mapping with customer teams across systems, handoffs, exceptions, and approvals, and turn it into a pilot scope with a clear Definition of Done.
- Connect the proposed solution to measurable business outcomes such as margin, availability, working capital, revenue, or cycle time.
- Build and demo pilots against the customer's own workflow, data shape, approval rules, and write-back targets.
- Own the technical evaluation, including security review, integration sizing, RFPs, architecture questions, and IT objections.
- Bring in Product or Engineering only when genuinely needed.
- Guide customers through early platform testing, including kickoffs, first workflow captures, and resolving issues before they stall the evaluation.
- Push back on scope, timelines, or success metrics that will not work.
- Stay in the deal through pilot delivery.
- Hand over cleanly to Forward Deployed Engineering so what was sold is what gets built.
- Build reusable demo assets, runbooks, and discovery patterns that make the whole team faster.
- Own the technical story in a deal.
- Run workshops with the customer's operations and IT people.
- Design the pilot that gets the deal from interest to a signed contract.
- Work closely with Account Executives in your region.
- Shape the pre-sales playbook the team runs on.
What they require
- 5+ years in pre-sales, solutions engineering, applied AI, enterprise automation, or forward-deployed work, selling or delivering into enterprise operations, IT, or finance buyers.
- Preferred: Retail or consumer goods experience.
- Hands-on with modern AI systems, including LLMs, agentic workflows, tool use, evaluation, and their practical limits.
- Strong process discovery and systems thinking; able to understand an unfamiliar operation and find leverage points.
- Comfortable with APIs, JSON, webhooks, SQL, and light Python or JavaScript.
- Able to investigate and prototype without needing to be a software engineer.
- Strong commercial judgment; able to qualify use cases, size value, spot buying signals, and know when to escalate.
- Excellent communication; able to shift between operators, architects, and executives, and explain complex systems in plain English.
- Track record of crisp, discovery-led demos rather than long product monologues.
- Fluent English.
- Willingness to travel to customer sites.
- Customer-obsessed, commercially aware, and comfortable operating in ambiguity.
- Fast and hands-on; builds the proof instead of waiting for a perfect spec.
- Low ego and high standards; listens closely and changes view when evidence changes.
- Honest about feasibility and risk, even when the answer is uncomfortable.
- Calm under pressure when a live demo or integration does not behave as expected.
Benefits
- Competitive salary and equity.
- Salary range shared on the first call.
- Seed-stage company backed by Index Ventures with a $15M seed round.
- Founder and CEO is Tom Cupr, who previously founded one of Europe's largest online grocery retailers.
- First pre-sales hire in the region; the function is yours to build.
- Remote across Europe / the US.
- Travel to customer sites in your region.
- Team offsite once a quarter.
- Hiring process aims to close in under three weeks.
Duvo helps large retailers and consumer-goods companies redesign and automate the operational processes that sit between systems and teams. Its agents execute work end to end across ERPs, portals, inboxes, spreadsheets and phone calls, write results back to the system of record, and provide evidence of what changed.