Sales Engineer, Partnerships & Bids

Description

About Us

At Utila, you’ll help build the modern, enterprise-grade platform that powers digital asset operations for more than 300 global institutions. Our technology secures $20B+ in monthly transaction volume and has protected over $100B to date, and we’re growing fast, backed by $50M in funding and a rapidly expanding customer base.

We work on mission-critical systems that demand innovation, precision, and deep technical expertise. If you’re excited by complex challenges, want to work with exceptionally strong teammates, and are looking to make a real impact on the future of financial technology, you’ll feel right at home here.

Join us, and help build something big.

How we work

From an idea, problem, or opportunity to the final product. We have the autonomy to make decisions, challenge what can be better, and the responsibility to make it happen. We look past specific tasks or product requirements to understand their impact on our customers, our product, and the company, while finding ways to improve it.

This fast-paced, high-standard culture isn’t for everyone. And that’s okay.

Responsibilities

The role

You’ll lead two areas on our Sales Engineering team: Utila’s technical partnerships and our bids (RFPs, RFIs, DDQs, and security questionnaires). We’re looking for real technical depth: someone who isn’t satisfied until they understand how a system works end to end, and who can turn that understanding into a clear picture for engineers, executives and procurement teams alike.

Both areas rely on the same core skills: deep Utila product knowledge, mapping our fit to client systems, and translating that into an actionable story. Bids reveal where deals stall and which partners can close the gap, while partnerships provide the leverage to win bids.

This is a pre-sales role. You’ll work closely with sales, BD, product, engineering, security, and marketing, and you’ll face partners and prospects directly. You won’t run discovery, demos, POCs or sales cycles.

What you’ll lead

Technical partnerships:

• Lead the technical scope of each partnership: validate the joint solution, scope the integration, and work through the technical details with the partner’s team.
• Be the technical counterpart to partners’ engineering and product teams, while BD leads the commercial terms.
• Spot new partnerships that would help win deals, including ones outside the current pipeline, and make the case to SE for why they matter.
• Write and maintain each partnership’s documentation, architecture diagrams, and collateral.
• Enable sales, marketing, and SE on each partnership: what it does, who it’s for, and how to position it.

Bid management:

• Run each RFX end to end, from intake to submission.
• Bring in the right people across product, engineering, security, legal, and commercial, so each part is answered well and on time.
• Shape the bid strategy for each RFX: how Utila is positioned, which partners to co-bid with, and how the joint solution fits together. Build the case and drive it to a decision with SE and commercial leadership.
• Answer the technical content as a product expert across Utila’s custody architecture, policy engine, supported chains, APIs, and compliance posture, pulling in SE and product for edge cases and new areas.
• Support the SE leading the deal in later bid stages, such as clarification calls, finalist presentations, and security reviews.
• Run our RFP answer library and the in-house AI tooling that drafts responses and keeps the library current, so each bid makes the next one faster.

Requirements

What you bring

• 3+ years in a technical role that faced customers or partners, such as sales or solutions engineering, solutions architecture or partner engineering. Technical bid management experience is a plus when paired with the engineering depth below.
• Real engineering depth from building or running systems yourself, for example in software engineering, solutions architecture, security or infrastructure. You can read code, call APIs directly and reason about how distributed systems, key management and security controls fit together.
• You’re comfortable going deep with a partner’s engineering team or a bank’s security architects, and you’d rather test something yourself than take a doc’s word for it.
• Curiosity about how things work. You go deep until you understand something, then explain the bigger picture to technical and business audiences alike.
• Clear, precise writing. You can turn a complex architecture into an answer a bank’s security team or a partner’s CTO will trust.
• Strong organization under deadlines. You’ve run several deliverables in parallel and kept many stakeholders on track.
• Confidence with external audiences, including senior technical, security, and compliance reviewers.

Nice to have

• Experience with digital assets, stablecoins, payments, or custody.
• Familiarity with MPC, wallet infrastructure or blockchain protocols such as EVM chains and Solana.
• Experience with RFP tools such as Loopio, and with institutional security questionnaires and frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001.
• Experience selling to or partnering with banks, payment firms or other regulated financial institutions.