Director of Sales Engineering, EMEA

Overview

You'll lead Sales Engineering across EMEA for HiBob, a mature HR platform that helps companies manage people operations. You're managing managers and senior individual contributors who already know how to run technical sales cycles. Your job is to create operational consistency across diverse markets, maintain quality standards, and ensure the team shows up predictably well to enterprise HR buyers.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Late-stage/Mature (2000+ employees suggests Series D+ or near-IPO)

Size: 2,013 employees

Growth: At scale but still hiring for leadership roles, suggesting continued expansion

Market Position: Established player in HR tech competing against mature incumbents and newer challengers

Product: HR management platform positioning HR as strategic business partner, not just admin function

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• Unknown exact split, but at this company size likely 40-50% inbound from brand/marketing
• Enterprise outbound to mid-market and enterprise accounts
• Some partner/referral from HR consulting firms

SDR/AE Structure: Established sales org with dedicated SDRs feeding AE pipeline

SE Support: You're building the SE strategy - established team structure with managers and senior ICs already in place

EMEA Complexity: You're dealing with multiple languages, regulations (GDPR, local labor laws), and buying processes across UK, DACH, France, Nordics, and other markets. Each region has different HR compliance requirements and competitive landscapes.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors: Likely competing against Workday, BambooHR, Personio (strong in EMEA), Rippling, and others in the HRIS/HCM space

How They Differentiate: Positioning as modern platform that makes HR strategic vs. administrative

Common Objections:

• "We already have [incumbent HRIS]"
• Migration complexity and data security concerns
• Integration with existing payroll/benefits systems
• Cost compared to current solution

Win Themes: Platform capabilities, user experience for employees, strategic HR features vs. admin tools

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Manager 1:1s & Coaching (25%) | Deal Reviews & Strategic Escalations (20%) | 
Cross-functional Meetings (20%) | Process/Ops Work (15%) | Recruiting/Hiring (10%) | 
Executive Updates (10%)

Key Activities

• Lead your leadership team: Weekly 1:1s with SE managers, reviewing their team performance, pipeline coverage, win/loss patterns. You're coaching managers on how to coach their ICs, not doing the frontline coaching yourself.
• Quality control across regions: Sitting in on major deal cycles, reviewing demo recordings, ensuring technical discovery is consistent. Fixing issues when demos are too generic or SEs aren't uncovering real requirements.
• Build operational discipline: Creating frameworks for demo standards, technical qualification criteria, POC scoping, and SE-to-AE handoffs. Making sure process exists and people follow it.
• Strategic deal escalations: Jumping into complex deals when buyers have unique technical requirements, integration challenges, or exec-level concerns your team needs help navigating.
• Cross-functional partnership: Weekly syncs with Sales leadership on pipeline health, Product on roadmap priorities and customer feedback, Marketing on technical content needs. Managing requests and priorities.
• Hiring and talent development: Building interview processes for new SE hires, calibrating who gets promoted, figuring out who's not working out. Probably hiring 2-4 people per quarter.
• Executive reporting: Monthly business reviews showing SE attach rates, win rates with SE involvement, POC conversion rates, where the team is spending time vs. where revenue is coming from.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Managing across diverse markets: What works in UK doesn't work in Germany. You're creating consistency without killing local market effectiveness. Different languages, buying cultures, competitive sets.
• Inherited team dynamics: You're walking into existing managers with established ways of working. Some will embrace your changes, others will resist. You need to read the room and bring people along without authority from Day 1.
• Balancing player-coach tension: Managers and senior ICs are strong - they don't need handholding. But you still need to create standards and process. Finding that line between helpful structure and unnecessary bureaucracy.
• Cross-functional influence without control: You don't control Product roadmap or Sales comp plans, but you need both to cooperate for your team to succeed. Lots of influence, negotiation, and building relationships.
• Deal complexity at enterprise level: These are 6-9 month sales cycles with procurement, legal, IT security, and multiple HR stakeholders. SEs get pulled into endless internal meetings and POC scope creep.
• Constant prioritization trade-offs: Not enough SEs to cover every deal. AEs always want more support. You're constantly deciding which deals get premium support and which don't.

What Success Looks Like

• SE attach rates hold or improve: Tracking % of qualified opps that get SE support and whether that coverage is focused on the right deals
• Win rates with SE involvement: Proving SE engagement correlates with closed-won outcomes
• Team retention and morale: Keeping your strong talent, especially senior ICs and managers who have other options
• Operational maturity: Deal reviews are structured, demo quality is consistent, POC processes don't spiral, post-mortems actually happen
• Pipeline predictability: You can forecast how many SEs you need for projected pipeline growth and your team isn't constantly underwater

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP/Director of HR at mid-market to enterprise companies (500-5000+ employees)
• CHRO at smaller enterprises
• IT/Systems teams (technical buyer for integrations, security, data)

What They Care About:

• HR: Employee experience, making their team look strategic not administrative, reducing manual work, compliance across multiple countries
• IT: Security, integrations with payroll/benefits/SSO, data migration complexity, ongoing maintenance burden
• Finance/Procurement: Total cost of ownership, contract terms, implementation timeline and cost
• Executive sponsors: ROI story, risk of change vs. staying with incumbent

Requirements

• Led Sales Engineering teams across EMEA at scale - you've managed managers, not just ICs
• Experience with enterprise B2B software sales cycles (3+ months, multiple stakeholders, technical + business buyers)
• Operational leadership capability: you've built SE processes, hired teams, created quality standards, not just winged it
• Executive presence to engage with C-level during strategic deals and represent SE in leadership meetings
• Cross-functional leadership: you've worked effectively with Sales, Product, Marketing without direct authority
• Emotional intelligence to lead experienced managers through change without burning bridges
• Probably 10+ years in Sales Engineering with at least 3-5 years leading managers
• EMEA market knowledge - understanding regional differences in buying behavior, compliance, competition