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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Technical Consulting Engineer

💰 $90,000 - $160,000

EngineeringConsultingCustomer SuccessPre-SalesCloud

🎯 Role Definition

The Technical Consulting Engineer (TCE) is a customer-facing technical specialist responsible for architecting, deploying, and supporting high-value solutions throughout the customer lifecycle — from pre-sales discovery and proof-of-concept (POC) to production implementation, onboarding, and ongoing optimization. A successful TCE blends solution architecture, systems integration, hands-on engineering, and strong communication skills to reduce time-to-value for customers while informing product improvements and go-to-market strategies.

This role frequently partners with sales, product management, engineering, customer success, and support teams to translate customer requirements into technical designs, create repeatable deployment patterns, and provide escalated technical help on critical issues. SEO and business keywords: Technical Consulting Engineer, solution architecture, pre-sales engineer, implementation engineer, cloud migrations, SaaS integrations, APIs, automation, customer success.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Systems Engineer
  • Solutions Architect (junior)
  • Technical Support / Customer Success Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Technical Consulting Engineer / Principal Consultant
  • Solutions Architect / Staff Solutions Architect
  • Customer Success Engineering Manager or Professional Services Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • Pre-Sales Engineer / Sales Engineer
  • Product Management (technical product owner)
  • Developer Advocacy or Developer Relations

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead technical discovery sessions with prospective and current customers to gather business requirements, map existing architectures, identify integration points, and produce a clear technical scope for pre-sales proposals and post-sales delivery.
  • Design end-to-end solution architectures that align customer goals with product capabilities, including cloud architecture (AWS/Azure/GCP), network topology, security controls, identity and access management, and data flow diagrams for scalable deployments.
  • Develop and deliver compelling technical product demonstrations and tailored proof-of-concept (POC) environments that validate value propositions, demonstrate integration feasibility, and accelerate buying decisions for enterprise customers.
  • Create detailed implementation plans, migration strategies, and runbooks for complex upgrades and greenfield deployments, ensuring maintenance windows, rollback plans, and risk mitigation are clearly documented.
  • Implement, configure, and extend product functionality in customer environments using scripting (Python, Bash), APIs, IaC (Terraform, CloudFormation), and configuration management tools to automate repetitive tasks and speed deployments.
  • Lead installation, integration, and testing activities — including data migrations, ETL/ELT jobs, API integrations, and configuration of third-party systems — to ensure reliable production cutovers and minimal business disruption.
  • Troubleshoot high-severity incidents and technical escalations by performing root cause analysis, coordinating cross-functional engineering resources, applying hotfixes or configuration changes, and documenting permanent fixes.
  • Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines, containerized deployments (Docker), and orchestration frameworks (Kubernetes) for customers that require automated, repeatable delivery patterns and robust observability.
  • Author technical documentation, architecture diagrams, runbooks, SOPs, and knowledge-base articles to standardize delivery, reduce onboarding time, and empower customer teams and internal stakeholders.
  • Provide training, enablement, and hands-on workshops to technical and non-technical customer stakeholders, empowering them to operate, monitor, and extend the solution post-deployment.
  • Monitor performance, capacity, and health metrics for deployed solutions, make optimization recommendations (query tuning, caching, autoscaling), and implement changes to improve reliability and cost efficiency.
  • Serve as the primary technical liaison between customers and product/engineering teams, collecting feature requests, reproducible issues, and usage patterns to help influence the product roadmap and prioritize customer-driven enhancements.
  • Lead technical responses to RFPs, RFIs, and security questionnaires by producing architecture diagrams, security controls descriptions, compliance artifacts, and integration feasibility assessments.
  • Collaborate with sales and pricing teams to scope professional services engagements, estimate implementation effort, and define clear deliverables and SLAs for statement-of-work (SOW) documents.
  • Manage stakeholder expectations throughout project lifecycles by communicating technical trade-offs, timelines, status updates, and risks in a clear, business-oriented manner.
  • Execute security and compliance assessments for customer deployments, including encryption, network segmentation, IAM policies, and assist with SOC audits, GDPR/CCPA considerations, and other regulatory requirements.
  • Design and carry out performance/load testing for critical components of the solution, analyze bottlenecks, and deliver targeted remediation plans to meet customer SLAs.
  • Drive repeatable best practices and reference architectures for common customer use-cases to reduce implementation time and increase overall customer satisfaction and retention.
  • Mentor junior consultants and engineers, perform technical reviews of deliverables, and promote a culture of continuous learning and post-implementation review to capture lessons learned.
  • Coordinate cross-functional incident responses and postmortems with internal support and engineering teams, ensuring timely resolution, customer communication, and actionable follow-up items.
  • Identify upsell and expansion opportunities during implementations and operational reviews by demonstrating additional modules, integrations, or advanced configurations that address uncovered customer needs.
  • Maintain up-to-date knowledge of relevant technologies (cloud services, container orchestration, observability, data stores), competitor offerings, and industry best practices to provide authoritative guidance to customers and internal teams.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist proposal teams with level-of-effort estimates and technical cost breakdowns for professional services.
  • Participate in product beta programs, customer advisory boards, and case study development to highlight successful implementations.
  • Build internal automation and tooling to accelerate standard installations and on-boarding workflows.
  • Provide on-call rotational support for escalations and production incidents as required.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Solution architecture and systems integration for SaaS, hybrid, and on-premise environments.
  • Cloud platforms: hands-on experience with AWS, Microsoft Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
  • API design, RESTful/webhooks, and systems integration using SDKs; ability to build and consume integrations reliably.
  • Scripting and automation: Python, Bash, PowerShell and experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
  • Databases and data handling: SQL (Postgres, MySQL), NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB), and data migration strategies.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS) and deployment patterns.
  • CI/CD tooling: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or equivalent automation tooling for repeatable releases.
  • Observability: logging, metrics and tracing tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Elastic Stack, Datadog, New Relic).
  • Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, load balancing, proxies, VPNs, DNS, and firewall configuration.
  • Security and compliance: encryption at rest/in transit, IAM, secrets management, SOC/GDPR/ISO considerations.
  • Performance tuning and capacity planning, including profiling, load testing, and remediation strategies.
  • Hands-on Linux/Unix administration and troubleshooting at the system level.

Soft Skills

  • Strong customer-facing communication: ability to explain complex technical topics to executives and engineers.
  • Consultative problem solving and requirements elicitation; balancing technical constraints with business outcomes.
  • Project and time management with a track record of delivering projects on schedule and within scope.
  • Cross-functional collaboration and influencing without direct authority across sales, engineering, and product teams.
  • Presentation and demo skills that build credibility and accelerate decision-making.
  • Empathy and client-centric mindset to build trust and long-term customer relationships.
  • Creative troubleshooting and analytical thinking for complex multi-system failures.
  • Adaptability to changing priorities, product updates, and fast-moving customer environments.
  • Mentoring and knowledge sharing to elevate junior team members and create repeatable delivery patterns.
  • Negotiation and expectation management in scoping, SOWs, and contract deliverables.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or equivalent technical discipline.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or MBA (technical product/business combination is a plus).
  • Relevant professional certifications (AWS/Azure/GCP associate/professional, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, CISSP, etc.) highly valued.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Data Science / Applied Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–8 years of professional experience in technical consulting, solutions engineering, systems integration, or related roles.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years delivering enterprise software solutions with direct customer engagement (pre-sales & post-sales).
  • Demonstrated experience with cloud migrations, SaaS integrations, and production deployments at scale.
  • Proven track record in designing complex architectures, leading POCs, and reducing time-to-value for enterprise customers.
  • Experience working with cross-functional distributed teams and contributing to product roadmaps via customer feedback.
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