Sales Engineer, Public Sector (West Region)
Job Description
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Your Role:
At Tenable, we are looking for a passionate, technically capable cybersecurity professional to join our Public Sector team as a Sales Engineer, focusing on the west region. In this role, you will be crucial in driving sales success and enhancing customer experience through technical credibility and an authentic understanding of government operations. You will work closely with Sales Representatives and a collaborative team to differentiate Tenable, build lasting customer trust, and create enthusiastic advocates for our solutions. We value strong technical curiosity, customer empathy, and growth potential—we can teach our sales process and the mechanics of the SE role to the right candidate.
Your Opportunity:
- Deliver Technical Demonstrations: Present compelling technical demonstrations of Tenable's platform, showcasing value and differentiation tailored to public sector needs.
- Support Evaluations: Assist with enterprise software trials and "Proof of Value" evaluations to ensure they align with customer goals.
- Bridge Technical Findings to Outcomes: Translate complex technical findings and exposure data into clear risk and business outcomes for both technical practitioners and executive leadership.
- Solve Real Problems: Address government agency challenges with consultative security insights that respect their operational constraints and budget realities.
- Engage and Educate: Answer technical questions, provide security insights, and support local events, conferences, and community engagements.
- Support Sales Efforts: Partner with sales representatives to achieve revenue targets, support local technical partners serving government clients, and contribute to RFI/RFP responses.
- Build Relationships: Foster strong, trusting relationships with customers, partners, and internal peers across all levels of the organization.
What You'll Need:
- Public-Sector Experience: Meaningful experience understanding how government organizations operate—including their missions, constraints, compliance requirements, procurement processes, and budget realities (gained from selling to, supporting, or working inside government).
- Cybersecurity Experience: Strong technical aptitude and hands-on experience in cybersecurity fundamentals (e.g., Vulnerability Management, Exposure Management, Attack Surface Management, Patch Management, CMDB, EDR, or IDAM).
- Effective Communicator & Storyteller: Clear communication and presentation skills with the potential to translate technical findings into business risk and become a strong storyteller across technical and non-technical audiences.
- Customer Empathy & Credibility: A natural instinct for customer empathy, earning trust through thorough preparation, accountability, and good judgment.
- Curiosity & Coachability: High technical curiosity, the ability to learn quickly, and the humility to receive coaching while taking personal initiative to keep developing.
- Team Player: A collaborative, team-first attitude focused on supporting colleagues and building shared success.
- Compliance Awareness: Familiarity with relevant public sector compliance standards and frameworks (e.g., CIS, NIST, State-specific regulations, GovRAMP, FedRAMP).
- Location & Flexibility: Based in or near the Austin, Texas region, with a willingness to travel within the territory as needed (up to 25%).
And Ideally:
- Tenable or ACAS Experience: Direct experience administering, using, or supporting Tenable products, or hands-on experience as an ACAS administrator, engineer, or consultant.
- Diverse Technical Background: Experience as a state/local government or higher-education security practitioner, military veteran with hands-on vulnerability management experience, public-sector security engineer/architect, or technical employee at a partner serving government clients.
- Presales Exposure: Previous sales or presales engineering experience (1–3 years) is helpful, though not required for candidates with strong foundational technical and public sector experience.
- Cloud & Infrastructure Knowledge: Foundational knowledge of major cloud infrastructure providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), network security concepts (TCP/IP), or enterprise operating systems.
- Automation Interest: Basic familiarity with or interest in scripting (e.g., Python) and automation tools.
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Tenable
View Company ProfileTenable (operating under tenable.com) is the premier, enterprise-grade cyber exposure management pioneer, vulnerability risk analytics innovator, and digital infrastructure resilience powerhouse engineered to operate as the definitive, high-velocity threat assessment, attack surface mapping, and proactive risk remediation layer for global corporate enterprises, critical infrastructure providers, and government agencies. The company completely eliminates the severe systemic friction of modern corporate asset defense—where distributed IT environments battle fragmented security logging, unprioritized vulnerability scanning data, blind spots across multi-cloud footprints, and delayed incident reaction pipelines—by deploying an advanced, risk-based operational visibility ecosystem. Moving far beyond traditional, passive signature-based defenses or disjointed network auditing checkers, Tenable natively unifies continuous hybrid cloud configuration auditing, operational technology (OT) structural monitoring, active directory identity path validation, and its legendary core vulnerability scanning infrastructure (anchored by Nessus, the world's most widely deployed vulnerability evaluation standard) into its unified flagship offering, the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform. Supporting more than 44,000 customers globally—including over 65 percent of the Fortune 500 and large-scale public sector networks—the system processes multi-tenant digital telemetry to identify, contextually score, and auto-prioritize exposure risks before exploitations occur with production-hardened engineering precision. Under the hood, its sophisticated technical core—publicly traded on the NASDAQ (TENB)—orchestrates high-concurrency event parsing, risk-based predictive analytics, and secure integration loops across complex cloud pipelines, DevOps architectures, and IT systems of record. What sets Tenable apart is its uncompromising dedication to replacing standard, disjointed point-in-time assessments with absolute asset clarity and preventative threat momentum; by bridging the gap between performance-intensive big data infrastructure profiling and instant, risk-informed remediation workflows, the enterprise remains the definitive cornerstone of modern algorithmic exposure management and corporate asset scaling.
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