What’s a Solution Engineer?
When I joined Algolia two and a half years ago, I had zero idea what it meant. Well, to be honest, I had no idea Solutions Engineers even existed. But “engineering solutions”? I was hooked. After all, as software engineers, isn’t it what we do all day? This got me interested. Surely, I needed to find out more about what it meant. And here I am two and a half years later, telling you about what I believe is the most thrilling job in the world.
Some background
I have always been passionate about programming. There’s just something about it that’s close to magical. By conjuring the power of syntax you are able to build programs that actually help people do more. There’s something that I find incredibly fulfilling about that, so much that I decided to study computer science and after that became a software engineer for five years. During this time, I spent most of my weekends building out ideas (given, some where not very useful,) and got more interested in UX, which lead my friend and I to start The UX Shop. I realized that although I had a blast building products, I was missing one ingredient. That was being in the field, talking to people who actually had the problems, understanding why, and seing how to help from a technological standpoint.
I’m a visual person, and a big believer in “show, don’t tell.” If we understand a problem well enough, we are able to hack a prototype that solves the problem at hand. And this prototype speaks for itself — people can test it, show it around, ask questions, and see if it works or if it doesn’t. This was something I was already doing as a software engineer when we had spikes, and it was clearly my favorite thing to do.
The definition
Alright, so back to the purpose of this post. What is Solutions Engineering? If you do some research, you might find a lot of very interesting articles, but most of them focus mostly on the sales aspect of the role. While it’s a big part of it, I’m not sure it’s the main mission. So what do we do? We’re engineers who know the in-and-outs of our company’s product, we carefully listen to and understand our customers problems to present them with the best way our product can solve it. While we don’t spend as much time coding as software engineers, we only focus on the 20% that solves the problem and collaborate with the product, sales, and engineering team. If we extract the essence of it, then here’s my definition:
Make customers projects successful using your company’s product.
And here we have it! At least, that’s how I’d explain if a five year-old were to ask me what my work is. Even though the definition is simple, there is a lot to learn even more than two years in. This mission, as it is, is also very generic. It will often be carried out by different teams who will specialize on different aspects. Yet even though there are nuances, I still think this overarching goal applies regardless the title — Sales Engineer, Solutions Consultant, Solutions Architect or Pre-Sales engineer — we’re all part of Field Engineeing.
Through this blog, I will try to document my journey as I’m learning, making mistakes, discovering and trying to make sense of the challenges of being a Solutions Engineer. And I hope you can learn a thing or two as well. :)
