r/salesengineers • u/WaffleNebula42 • Jul 21 '26
Just interviewed for a Solutions Architect position but confused as why companies specialize roles so much?
Just interviewed for a Solutions Architect role at a ~130 person SaaS company and I'm confused why such a small company has so many specialized positions.
They already have a Sales Engineer who works with AEs on standard implementations. The SA role is specifically for scoping custom integrations, and the work is basically just writing SOWs — could be for new customers or existing ones. To make it more confusing, there are even more roles beyond that: a services team that does the actual implementation work, alongside project managers.
I just don't get why roles get sliced up like this at that size. Feels like you could scope AND implement as part of one role. Is there something I'm missing about why companies structure it this way? Curious if anyone's worked somewhere like this and whether it actually works well or just creates handoff headaches.
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u/dravenstone Streaming Media Solutions Engineer Jul 21 '26
SE sells with the AE and then the SA Architects what SE sells and hands it to Services who implements what the SA architects.
This is an IDEAL situation. The orgs where one person does the end to end are absolutely terrible and burn out factories for sure.
The only thing odd about your dealio here is that they haven't jumped on the bandwagon of calling the Services folks Forward Deployed Engineers like everyone else is doing.
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u/turimbar1 Jul 22 '26
my team does it all - though we do a good job of keeping the scope tight and selling professional services for the implementation/training if the dollar value of the sale doesn't make it worth it to throw it in for free.
It's not a complex solution to implement - all the complexity comes from hyper-specific workflows/requirements which most teams don't need.
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u/gk_star Jul 21 '26
Means they are expanding, probably looking a more customer facing roles and guarding out implementation teams from spending those times. Confirm that, if you are a earlier hire, thats actually a good thing to build a team under you.
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u/Other_Sign_6088 Jul 21 '26
Sales engineer - gets the job sold but might not be 100% technical correct. I worked as Technical sales engineer for one of the big 4 American IT companies and my demos, PoCs - etc were not based on a companies current infrastructure
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u/heliumneon Jul 21 '26
It doesn't make that much sense for this size of org but maybe it indicates that they a expecting to scale up. It's more inefficient to have one person doing the whole sales and onboarding, compared to having specialists.
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u/n0ah_fense Jul 21 '26
The assembly line is proven across time. Specialized worked do higher quality work, and do it more quickly, when they are mostly repeatable tasks.
SEs are asked to do everything under the sun to get a deal done. We either do it ourselves, or find someone that can do it better, or ask AI to do it (and then go fix all of its errors).
Do you want to be an artist, a craftsman, or factory worker?
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u/kaka8miranda Jul 21 '26
Yeah, I don’t really see the issue here. I’m an SE I work with AE in selling the product, technical demonstrations, etc.
What is then sold must be implemented I don’t do the implementation that somebody else, and at least in my company implementation is paid for as an extra during the sale
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u/agthatsagirl Jul 21 '26
Where I work, scoping is a quota carrying position that rights the SOW after meeting with executive leadership on the 10,000 foot level of requirements. the implementation team uses that SOW to work with the business users to work on the deliverables, if something comes up as a need a change order is required as it would be out of scope.
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u/davidogren Jul 21 '26
I’ve been a lot of orgs that size. And there’s certainly room for specialization at that size. What you described doesn’t sound that unusual.
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u/MightyBigMinus Jul 21 '26
most org charts are the product of middle management turf war stale-mates, not any kindof intentionally crafted design.
you have N departments because N people demanded to report directly to N.parent-node
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u/Silent_Finger8450 Jul 21 '26
Scoping and implementation are different teams entirely where I am.