Sector Guide
Selling to platform engineering and SRE teams is a technical sale to a technical buyer who can read your docs. We hire the sales engineers and AEs who can hold that conversation.
Key Facts
Bottom-up adoption, top-down budget
£85k–£110k base
Land bottom-up, expand top-down
From kick-off, every engagement
Most DevOps and infrastructure products land through an engineer trying the free tier and expand through a VP Engineering or CIO budget conversation. That means you need sellers who respect the practitioner and can still run a six-figure commercial negotiation.
We screen against both halves. A pure enterprise seller who dismisses the community signal will kill adoption; a pure PLG seller often cannot close the expansion.
Observability and monitoring, CI/CD and developer platforms, container and Kubernetes tooling, hybrid and cloud storage, data infrastructure, FinOps and cloud cost, and API and integration platforms.
Clients in this space have included Nasuni, Druva, Lumigo, Resilio, Virtana and Extreme Networks.
For pre-sales roles we run a scenario walk-through: architecture, integration path, migration risk and how they would handle an engineer challenging the benchmark numbers in a public channel. It surfaces the difference between people who have shipped proofs of value and people who have watched them.
2026 pay benchmarks
| Role | UK | US | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-market AE | £70k–£85k base · £140k–£170k OTE | $120k–$140k base · $240k–$280k OTE | 50/50 split standard, quota 4–5x OTE |
| Enterprise AE | £90k–£110k base · £180k–£220k OTE | $140k–$170k base · $280k–$340k OTE | Large-ACV roles run 5.5–6x quota-to-OTE |
| Sales Engineer / SA | £85k–£110k base · £105k–£140k OTE | $150k–$185k base · $190k–$240k OTE | 80/20 split; cyber and AI infra pay a premium |
Full dataset: 2026 GTM salary and hiring benchmarks. Model the cost of a vacant seat with the quota loss calculator.
FAQ
The buyer is technical and evaluates the product directly, often before speaking to sales. Sellers need to be credible with practitioners and comfortable with usage-based pricing and consumption forecasting, which is a different commercial skill from seat-based SaaS.
Yes. We hire the first enterprise sellers and sales engineers for open-source and product-led companies, where the challenge is layering a commercial motion on top of existing adoption without damaging community trust.
Contingent searches are charged as a percentage of first-year base salary, payable only on placement. Retained and RPO engagements are staged or fixed-fee and work out lower per hire at volume. We quote before any work starts, with no fee for the market map.
You receive a shortlist within 14 days of kick-off. Median time from kick-off to signed offer across our 2025 to 2026 searches is under six weeks, with the interview process itself the usual bottleneck rather than pipeline.
Contingent suits one-off or opportunistic hires. Retained suits leadership and confidential searches where you need guaranteed focus. RPO suits teams hiring five or more revenue seats in a year and wanting a single embedded partner.
Related Guides
A short intro call is usually enough to tell whether we're the right partner for the search.
