Technical Account Executive, Observability

Overview

You're selling SigNoz—an open-source alternative to Datadog and New Relic—to engineering teams who are frustrated with proprietary observability tools. You own the entire sales cycle: first call through customer success handoff. That means running discovery with VPs of Engineering, delivering technical demos to platform teams, helping developers with OpenTelemetry instrumentation questions, and navigating security/legal/procurement reviews. No SE to loop in when things get technical.

Role Snapshot

Company Context

Stage: Series A/B (YC W21, growth stage based on 500+ customers)

Size: 53 employees

Growth: 25K+ GitHub stars, 500+ paying customers across 30+ countries, actively hiring for growth and DevRel roles

Market Position: Challenger in crowded observability space (competing with Datadog, New Relic, Grafana Cloud). Building on open-source credibility and OpenTelemetry standard adoption.

GTM Reality

Pipeline Sources:

• 40-50% Inbound - leads from GitHub stars converting to cloud trials, developers who hit self-hosted limitations, companies searching for Datadog alternatives. Quality varies—some are tire-kickers, others have real budget and pain.
• 30-40% Outbound - targeting companies with observable engineering blogs, teams hiring SREs/platform engineers, companies with known Datadog/New Relic contracts coming up for renewal.
• 10-20% Community referrals - word-of-mouth from open-source users, developer communities, conference connections.

SDR/AE Structure: Likely self-sourcing or light SDR support (53-person company won't have large SDR team). You'll need to prospect.

SE Support: None. You are the technical resource. If you can't answer OpenTelemetry instrumentation questions or explain ClickHouse query performance, you're stuck.

Competitive Landscape

Main Competitors:

• Datadog (market leader, expensive, proprietary)
• New Relic (legacy player, complex pricing)
• Grafana Cloud (open-source friendly, different architecture)
• Honeycomb, Lightstep (observability-native players)

How They Differentiate:

• Built natively on OpenTelemetry (standard is winning)
• No user-based or host-based pricing (Datadog's pricing model is widely hated)
• Can self-host or use cloud (flexibility for security-conscious orgs)
• Single pane for metrics, traces, logs (Datadog does this too, but at 3x the cost)

Common Objections:

• "We already have Datadog" (most common—requires business case on cost savings)
• "OpenTelemetry is immature" (less true now, but some teams are skeptical)
• "Your query language isn't as polished" (ClickHouse queries vs Datadog's UI)
• "We need more integrations" (smaller ecosystem than incumbents)
• "What if you go out of business?" (open-source mitigates this, but startups vs Datadog stability)

Win Themes:

• Cost savings (often 60-70% vs Datadog at scale)
• OpenTelemetry-native (future-proofs instrumentation)
• Transparent pricing (no surprise bills)
• Developer credibility (25K GitHub stars)

What You'll Actually Do

Time Breakdown

Prospecting/Outbound (25%) | Active Deals (45%) | Customer Technical Support (20%) | Internal (10%)

Key Activities

• Discovery calls with VPs of Engineering and Platform Leads: You're diagnosing their observability pain—usually cost, complexity, or vendor lock-in. These calls require you to understand their current stack (what APM tool, what's instrumented, how much they're spending) and map to SigNoz capabilities. You need to speak their language about distributed tracing, cardinality issues, and retention policies.

• Technical demos for platform/SRE teams: You're showing the product live—walking through traces, demonstrating queries, explaining how OpenTelemetry data flows into SigNoz. Developers will ask hard questions about sampling, data retention, query performance. You can't fumble here. You'll also need to guide them through a POC where they instrument a service and send data to SigNoz cloud or self-hosted.

• OpenTelemetry instrumentation guidance: Prospects will hit issues getting their apps instrumented—Java agent conflicts, missing trace context, custom metric labels. You need to troubleshoot or know when to pull in a solutions engineer. This isn't "let me get someone technical"—you ARE that person.

• Navigating procurement and security reviews: Once technical fit is clear, you're chasing down infosec teams for SOC 2 questions, legal for contract redlines, and finance for PO approvals. This part is slow and repetitive. Deals stall here often—especially at larger companies where observability tooling touches compliance requirements.

The Honest Reality

What's Hard

• You're selling against entrenched incumbents: Most prospects already have Datadog or New Relic. Rip-and-replace is a heavy lift. You're often selling to teams who are frustrated with cost but haven't committed to switching yet. Deals take longer than you'd expect because migration effort is real.

• Technical credibility is non-negotiable: You can't fake your way through this. If you don't understand distributed tracing, OpenTelemetry collectors, or cardinality explosions, engineers will sniff it out immediately. You'll spend significant time learning the product deeply and staying current on observability trends.

• Open-source creates pricing pressure: Free self-hosted version means prospects will ask "why should we pay for cloud?" You're constantly justifying cloud pricing vs DIY hosting costs (their engineer time, infrastructure, support burden). Some deals convert from self-hosted to cloud, but others never do.

What Success Looks Like

• You close 10-15 new logo deals per year, mix of $15K self-service deals and $100K+ enterprise contracts
• 60%+ of your POCs convert to paid (high intent pipeline due to open-source try-before-buy)
• You maintain technical credibility—developers at your accounts ping you directly with questions instead of support
• You develop a repeatable playbook for displacing Datadog at growth-stage companies

Who You're Selling To

Primary Buyers:

• VP of Engineering / Head of Platform (budget holder, cares about cost and team productivity)
• Staff/Principal Engineers, SRE/Platform Leads (technical evaluator, cares about OpenTelemetry fit and query power)
• Sometimes FinOps or procurement (involved in vendor consolidation initiatives)

What They Care About:

• Total cost of ownership: Datadog bills are exploding, they need to justify or reduce spend. Your business case needs to be airtight on cost savings.
• OpenTelemetry commitment: Teams investing in OTel want a vendor that won't lock them in again. They'll test your OTel-native claims.
• Query flexibility: Power users want to write custom queries, not be limited by a UI. ClickHouse query capability is a selling point for this persona.
• Migration risk: How hard is it to switch from Datadog? What's the downtime? What breaks? They need confidence you can support the transition.

Requirements

• 3+ years in technical sales, selling to engineering teams (bonus if you've sold observability, monitoring, APM, or infrastructure tooling)
• Genuine technical chops—you should understand distributed systems, tracing, logs, metrics concepts. Prior engineering experience or deep technical curiosity required.
• Experience running full sales cycles including procurement/legal navigation at companies with 200-2000 employees
• Comfort with open-source sales motion—understand how community-led growth and commercial conversion work together
• Self-starter mindset—small team means you'll build your own outbound lists, create demo environments, and figure out what messaging works
• EU or India timezone (you're covering these regions)