Hi, I’m Bradley. I’m the Director of Sales Engineering at Cortex, and this is how curiosity has shaped my approach to sales engineering and building technical partnerships that drive engineering excellence.
Bradley's journey in sales engineering
I’ve been in sales engineering my entire career. Right out of college, I joined a small startup where I demoed the product, onboarded customers, and supported them as we rolled out new features.
What drives me in sales engineering (SE) is an innate curiosity about how the world works. I started as a biomedical and computer engineer in university, which sparked my interest in understanding how things function.
My career really accelerated at Onshape, a computer-aided design company, where I was brought on with the first few sales hires to build out the pre-sales organization. That's where I truly developed my demo expertise. I ended up doing 400 demos in my first year alone! I started on the hardware side with Onshape, and I was fascinated by how parts are designed, manufactured, and used in the physical world. I gradually became more interested in how things happen behind a 2D screen, and how software runs and operates everything around us.
After PTC acquired Onshape, I moved to Jellyfish, an engineering intelligence tool, where I helped build out their SE team from scratch. That experience introduced me to the developer tooling space, eventually leading me to Cortex.
Cortex solves the real problems blocking developers
Cortex solves a real, widespread problem for engineering organizations: how to bring visibility, accountability, and consistency to team operations. It is the tab that’s always open in a browser for developers, engineering managers, and leadership teams. It’s rare to find a product that resonates clearly with engineering leadership and provides value across day-to-day workflows.
I'm in sales engineering because I want to help people do their best work and enable organizations to make the best products possible. To do this, we need to remove the red tape that prevents engineering teams from hitting the ground running.
Think about a developer joining a large organization for the first time. Something as simple as getting access to a test environment or deploying their first lines of code can be surprisingly complex. They might have to file multiple tickets to set up their environment and gain access to the codebase. The code may have unclear dependencies, and the developer might not have access to the right documentation to understand it, if they can find it at all. Cortex smooths this path forward, and that's what keeps me invested in my job every day.
The critical role of sales engineering
Engineering leaders have to deal with fragmented systems, service sprawl, unclear ownership, and inconsistent quality. One of the biggest obstacles I see is simply connecting with other engineering leaders to understand what "good" looks like within an industry. Engineering leaders want to know if they're on the right path and if the things they're testing out are working well, but the feedback loop doesn't always exist, either within the organization or at a macro level.
This is where Cortex's sales engineering team comes in. We've had hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations with engineering teams. We pattern-match across organizations, understand what excellence looks like, and share those learnings. When we hear a familiar challenge, we can say, "You're actually pretty similar to another customer we've worked with. Let me walk you through an approach to streamline your developer onboarding or security maturation."
With these insights, the SE team has a unique role in product development. We have visibility into what's coming down the product roadmap and are the first to speak with prospects about their challenges. This allows us to combine product development and customer needs to create those perfect "wow moments."
We're constantly in the product, gaining a lot of experience with it and showcasing it to the outside world. This gives us a unique perspective on the use cases people bring to us and the technical nuances of how our product works. With our product insights, we can paint what’s possible for prospects, customers, and even internal teams.
Building a high-impact SE team
As I scale the SE function at Cortex, I’m focused on maintaining a 2:1 ratio of account executives to sales engineers, and we're actively hiring for a West Coast-based sales engineer right now.
There are three components of a great sales engineer that I look for:
Trust and autonomy: We hire people we trust to get the job done. As a startup moving quickly, we need team members who can identify areas for improvement and take initiative.
Experimentation: You must be willing to try new approaches without following a pre-existing process, develop solid hypotheses, and share successes with the team.
Curiosity: We serve diverse industries and market segments, so you need to have a broad interest in how engineering teams operate across different organizations and in what those organizations do.
A sales engineer at Cortex becomes a trusted advisor to our prospects and customers. We have deep technical knowledge of how Cortex operates, can apply what we’ve learned from existing successful customers, and tie that into new conversations with prospects.
We have to be honest about what Cortex can and cannot solve. Sometimes the solution isn't Cortex alone, but a mix of approaches. At the end of the day, we want organizations to run better, with or without our product. Hopefully, Cortex helps, but ultimately, we want them to find the best solution to improve their operations.
Growing the team
It's an exciting time to join Cortex's sales engineering team. We're establishing processes to scale, and new team members can help write the playbooks. New SE team members have autonomy and can provide input to the sales and product teams. You’ll get to impact not just how we sell but also what we build and how we deliver value.
If you have experience as a successful sales engineer at a developer tooling startup and want to work with some of the best engineering teams in the world, this is the place for you. Technical chops are a must, but more importantly, team members who are curious, empathetic, and love building are most successful on this team.
I'm looking for true partners for our sales reps and customers who want to see organizations thrive with Cortex. We maintain tight relationships with our post-sales counterparts and have solid feedback loops where teams share what's working and what isn't.
If Cortex sounds like a place you want to pursue your own path towards excellence, we want to hear from you! Find a role at https://www.cortex.io/careers today!