"Diary of a Sales Engineer" takes you on an insightful journey through the dynamic world of sales engineering, hosted by industry veterans Ryan Krueger and Sameer Kausar. Each episode offers candid experiences, practical advice, and insider tips to help you navigate and thrive in your career. Whether you're just starting out or looking to sharpen your skills, this podcast is your go-to resource for all things sales engineering.
What actually comes next after becoming a Solutions Engineer?
For most SEs, the obvious answers are bigger accounts or management. Chris Clark thinks that's way too limiting.
Chris spent 15 years in Solutions Engineering at companies including Slack, Salesforce, and Glean before moving into career coaching full time. We brought him on to talk through the different paths available to SEs and, more importantly, how to figure out which one is actually right for you.
We get into Field CTO and evangelist roles, specialist IC paths, leadership vs. management, how AI is changing the SE role, and why you shouldn't build your career around chasing titles.
Chris also puts Ryan and Sameer through a live career coaching exercise that leads to a slightly dangerous conclusion about Ryan's future as an AE.
The biggest takeaway: figure out what work gives you energy, start doing more of it, and don't wait for someone else to design your career for you.
Find Chris:
https://www.chrisjamesclark.co.uk/ (https://www.chrisjamesclark.co.uk/)
Pre-Sales Pathfinder: https://app.chrisjamesclark.co.uk/ (https://app.chrisjamesclark.co.uk/)
Podcast: Pre-Sales Pathways
6 Aug 2026
From Grocery Bagger to Running an SE Team at Ramp
Curtis Breidenthal is Enterprise Solutions Manager at Ramp. He got there with a kinesiology degree, no coding background, and a resume that started with bagging groceries.
Curtis takes us through the whole climb: chat support at Bill.com, a cross country bet on himself, and the months he spent training for a sales engineering job that had not opened yet. He gets into what he had to unlearn from customer support to be good at presales, why the best demo is often the one you never show, and the single word that cost him an extra follow up call with a buyer. We also dig into the AI slop problem in sales, what actually changes when you move from commercial to enterprise, and the one skill from his support days that he says separates good SEs from great ones.
If you are trying to break into sales engineering, or you are an SE weighing the jump to enterprise or into management, this is the one to put on.
Diary of a Sales Engineer is available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.
www.diaryofasalesengineer.com
7 Jul 2026
RIP Traditional Presales
RIP traditional presales. Ryan Krueger and Sameer Sahay-Kausar sit down to map what is actually replacing it, and what the shift means for your career as a sales engineer.
We get into why "pre-sales" is a label that no longer fits, the new roles taking shape (we coin a couple live, the account engineer and the forward deploy solution engineer), and how consumption-based pricing quietly rewires everything about how solutions engineers create value. We also dig into why SEs are already writing and shipping code to fix product gaps, the three dials every SE has to balance, and how leaders should be thinking about team building in this chaos. There is also a simple, freeing takeaway about switching industries and why saying "I don't know" makes you more credible, not less.
If you are a sales engineer, solutions consultant, forward deployed engineer, or an SE leader trying to stay ahead of where the role is going, this one is for you.
Diary of a Sales Engineer is available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.
www.diaryofasalesengineer.com
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