Solutions Engineer

Overview

You're demoing Euna's financial management suite to public sector organizations—cities, counties, school districts, and state agencies. You work alongside Account Executives to run technical discovery, lead product demos, build proof-of-concepts, and answer the endless technical questions that come up in government procurement processes. The product is a full suite covering budgeting, procurement, grants management, and revenue collection, so you need to know multiple modules and how they connect.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Private equity-backed, mature (taken private in 2022, $500M valuation in 2016)

Size: 658 employees

Growth: Actively acquiring companies (just bought AmpliFund for grants management), rolling up GovTech point solutions into a unified platform

Market Position: Challenger in a fragmented space—competing against Tyler Technologies (the 800-lb gorilla), Oracle/Infor (legacy ERP systems), and smaller niche players like OpenGov, Questica, and ClearGov

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40% Inbound - leads from conferences (NLC, NACo, GFOA), website demos, existing customer referrals
• 35% Outbound - AEs prospecting into greenfield accounts, replacement deals targeting legacy system frustrations
• 25% RFPs - responding to formal government procurement processes (time-intensive, low win rate)

SDR/AE Structure: No dedicated SDRs—AEs self-source and work inbound leads. You partner with 3-4 AEs typically.

SE Support: Small SE team (you'll be stretched thin), shared across the sales org. Expect to juggle 6-10 active deals at various stages.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors:

• Tyler Technologies (dominant incumbent with 30%+ market share)
• OpenGov (well-funded, modern UI, strong in cloud-native budgeting)
• Legacy ERP systems (Oracle, SAP, Infor—clunky but entrenched)
• Questica, ClearGov, Abila (niche budget/procurement tools)

How They Differentiate: Full-suite play (budget + procurement + grants + revenue in one platform vs point solutions), purpose-built for public sector vs generic ERP, cloud-native vs legacy on-prem systems

Common Objections:

• "We already have Tyler/Oracle and it works fine" (change management fear)
• "Your platform is less mature than Tyler" (perception vs reality)
• Integration concerns with existing financial systems
• Implementation timelines and resource requirements
• Price compared to keeping legacy systems limping along

Win Themes: Modern user experience, better reporting/transparency for councils/boards, consolidation of multiple point solutions, lower total cost of ownership vs maintaining old systems

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Demos (35%) | POCs/Custom Config (25%) | RFP Responses (20%) | Internal Prep (20%)

Key Activities

• Product Demonstrations: Run 60-90 minute demos tailored to the buyer's workflows—budget prep for finance, requisition approval for procurement, grant tracking for program managers. You're screensharing, clicking through modules, and fielding "can it do this?" questions in real-time. Expect 4-6 demos per week during busy periods.

• Technical Discovery: Spend 30-60 minutes with IT directors, finance teams, and department heads mapping out their current systems, integrations (usually some combination of legacy ERP, Excel, and homegrown databases), data migration needs, and compliance requirements. Government has strict security and accessibility standards you need to document.

• Proof-of-Concept Builds: Configure demo environments with the prospect's actual data—import their chart of accounts, set up their budget workflow approvals, build custom reports they care about. This takes 10-20 hours per POC and is critical to winning competitive deals. You're often racing against Tyler or OpenGov doing the same thing.

• RFP Response Support: Government loves RFPs. You'll spend hours answering technical questionnaires (200+ questions is normal), writing deployment plans, documenting security controls, and explaining integration architecture. AEs lean on you heavily here because it's technical and tedious.

• Internal Coordination: Sync with Product on feature gaps that prospects keep asking about, work with Implementation to set realistic timelines, loop in CSMs on existing customer references, brief executives before big demos. Lots of Slack threads and internal calls.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• Government procurement is slow as hell: Deals that should close in 3 months take 9-12 because of budget committee meetings, RFP processes, reference checks, legal reviews, and endless bureaucracy. You'll demo the same prospect 4-5 times to different stakeholders before anything moves forward.

• You're always behind on RFPs: The team is small, deals are complex, and RFPs are massive time sinks with low win rates (maybe 20-30%). You'll be working nights and weekends during RFP season trying to keep up.

• Feature parity battles: Tyler has been doing this for 40 years—they have features Euna doesn't. You'll hear "Tyler can do X" constantly and need to position around it or escalate as a product gap. Some deals you just can't win because you're missing a must-have capability.

• Implementation anxiety: Prospects are terrified of switching from systems they've used for 10-15 years. You're selling change management as much as software, and implementation timelines are long (6-12 months). If Implementation screws up or the customer doesn't dedicate resources, that reflects badly on you even though it's post-sale.

What Success Looks Like

• You're supporting $400K-500K in quarterly bookings across your assigned AEs
• Deals you SE'd close at 30%+ win rate (vs 15-20% org average on pure outbound)
• Customers specifically mention your demo or POC as a reason they chose Euna in deal post-mortems
• You're building repeatable demo flows and POC templates that other SEs can use

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• Finance Directors / CFOs (cities, counties, school districts)
• Budget Managers / Controllers
• Procurement Directors
• CIOs / IT Directors (technical vetting and security signoff)
• Grants Managers (especially in school districts)

What They Care About:

• Transparency and audit trails: Elected officials and boards demand visibility into spending—they need reports, dashboards, and detailed approval workflows
• Ease of use: Current systems often require weeks of training; they want something department heads can actually use without IT handholding
• Integration with existing systems: Need to connect to their financial system of record (often Tyler Munis, Oracle, SAP), HR/payroll, asset management, citizen payment portals
• Compliance: Government has strict requirements around accessibility (Section 508), security (StateRAMP, FedRAMP for federal funds), data residency, and retention policies
• Total cost of ownership: They're comparing your SaaS pricing to keeping old systems alive with maintenance contracts and IT staff time

Requirements

• 3-5 years in a Solutions Engineering, Sales Engineering, or technical consultant role (public sector or financial software experience is a big plus)
• You can run a polished product demo without reading from a script—need to think on your feet when prospects ask curveball questions mid-demo
• Comfortable configuring software (you're not coding, but you're setting up workflows, building reports, importing data, troubleshooting why something isn't working)
• Understanding of budget/finance workflows—if you don't know what a fund balance is or how procurement requisitions flow, you'll be behind
• Thick skin for government procurement processes—lots of bureaucracy, slow decisions, and deals that go dark for months
• Willingness to travel occasionally for on-site demos, user conferences (GFOA, NLC), and finalist presentations (maybe 20-30% travel)
• Ability to write clearly—RFP responses and technical documentation are a big part of the job