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
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