Solutions Engineer

The Solutions Engineer (SE) for France is a critical technical and business-driven consultant who understands the specific digital transformation needs of French and European enterprises. Acting as a trusted advisor, the SE provides business-centric expertise that helps our regional Sales team establish market relevance, secure deal-level visibility, and clearly differentiate Talkdesk's AI-powered solutions from legacy competitors.

This role is calibrated for a fully autonomous, mid-level operator who is highly "AI-savvy." You are not just a presenter of slides; you are a hands-on practitioner who knows how to configure conversational AI products, build live prototypes, and architect solutions. You will deeply understand the unique nuances of the French market—including data sovereignty expectations, regulatory compliance (such as GDPR), and complex system integrations—while maintaining fluent, daily collaboration in English with our global product and engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Hands-on AI Prototyping & Configuration: Design, build, and configure customized, live proof-of-concepts (PoCs) featuring Talkdesk Autopilot and AI Agents. This includes hands-on prompt engineering, defining Guardrails, setting up Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) knowledge sources, and mapping conversational flows.
• Strategic French Market Advisory: Understand customer-specific business challenges in France and French-speaking Europe to provide consultative, business-driven solutions for prospective and existing customers, guiding them on how to transition from legacy, rigid IVRs to dynamic, AI-powered automation.
• Deal Strategy & Differentiation: Partner with the regional Sales team to deliver business-centric expertise. Establish highly resonant, deal-level visibility that clearly positions Talkdesk's speed, agility, and AI superiority over competitor offerings.
• Technical Architecture Design: Map out integrations between Talkdesk's AI suite and customer ecosystem technologies (CRMs, APIs, legacy telephony via SIP Trunking) to support seamless, secure automation.
• End-to-End Sales Lifecycle Ownership: Smoothly transition across key facets of the sales cycle, including pre-sales engineering support, solution qualification, custom architecture design, and post-sale upsell strategy.
• C-Suite Influence: Act as a credible thought leader confidently presenting to and addressing French C-level executives (CIOs, CTOs, COOs, and Customer Experience Directors) to expand revenue opportunities.

Requirements

• Bilingual English & French Mastery: Native French speaker with professional business fluency in English. You must be equally comfortable leading a highly technical discovery call in French and jumping onto a global product call in English to discuss roadmap features, file bug reports, or write technical documentation.
• AI & Prompt Engineering Savviness: Demonstrated experience configuring AI/NLP systems, LLM‑based applications, or conversational AI platforms. You should understand how temperature, prompt design, and context windows affect AI agent performance.
• High Responsiveness: Demonstrate an exceptional level of responsiveness to internal stakeholders and external clients throughout complex, fast-moving sales cycles.
• Expert "Tell-Show-Tell" Presentation: Possess superior presentation and demonstration skills, both virtual and live, utilizing Talkdesk's "tell-show-tell" format to map technical features directly to tangible business value.
• Interactive Facilitation: Exhibit expert facilitation skills for executive briefings, workshops, and discovery sessions, showing a strong ability to listen actively, guide group dynamics, and challenge the status quo constructively.
• Critical Thinking & Problem Solving: Adept at critical thinking and complex problem‑solving, with the ability to take a vague customer business problem (e.g., "Our billing queue is overwhelmed") and physically configure an elegant, automated AI Agent solution to resolve it in a live demonstration.
• Strategic Collaboration: Exhibit strong teamwork skills, acting as a true strategic partner to both the client and the regional account team.
• Structured Progress: Meet weekly with your direct manager to align on pipeline priorities, celebrate accomplishments, and systematically overcome deal‑level hurdles.
• Regional Travel: Willingness to travel to customer sites across France and Southern Europe, as well as occasional international internal meetings (travel estimated at 20-50%).

Core Competencies

• Experience: 3+ years of Solutions Engineering (Pre‑sales) experience in an AI, Conversational AI, or SaaS/CCaaS environment (calibrated specifically for a fully autonomous, mid-level SE).
• AI Configuration Skills: Practical, hands‑on experience configuring chatbots, voic