Director - Solution Engineering

About the Role 

Zeta solves hard technology problems for financial institutions. We do not offer a single product sold repeatedly, but solutions assembled from our processing, issuing, payments, lending, core, and digital banking platforms to answer a problem a bank has been unable to solve with what it already owns. 

Banks do not buy platforms. They buy the belief that a platform will survive their hardest workloads,their integration mechanics, and their examiner. You are the person who builds that belief, deep enough that the bank's own architects will defend it in a room you are not in. 

This is a hands-on individual contributor role with ownership of the sales engineering function for Zeta's banking solutions business in the US. You will run technical discovery with institutions that have twenty years of accumulated systems, design the target architecture and the path to it, defend that design through enterprise architecture, security, and procurement review, and stay on the deal until it signs.  

Deep expertise 

• Gain an in-depth and hands-on understanding of the full Zeta stack: processing and issuing across credit, debit, and prepaid, core banking, deposits, lending, payments, fraud, loyalty, digital banking applications, and our agentic AI capabilities 

• In depth here means equivalent to our Product and Engineering teams that actually develop the stack, with first-hand knowledge of the modules, APIs, low-code extension points, events, data model, and features 

• Hands-on means having used each of those interfaces, APIs, events, and features yourself, in the manner an actual customer is expected to use them 

• Know the deployment story cold: environments, residency, resilience, and the answers an institution's infrastructure and security teams will demand 

Discovery and solution design 

• Run technical discovery inside institutions with large existing estates, and find the problem worth solving rather than the problem first described 

• Assemble solutions across multiple platforms into one proposition, and be the person who decides what is in scope and what is a later phase 

• Craft solutions that meet the customer's needs on the fly during calls and presentations, with the readiness to demonstrate them live 

Reference architecture and coexistence 

• Produce the target architecture and the integration design against the institution's existing core, ledger, data, and channel systems 

• Design coexistence and phasing: what moves first, what runs in parallel, what is decommissioned and when.  

• Build the reusable reference architectures that let the next deal start from something 

Demos and proofs 

• Build and maintain demo environments across the platform set, covering the workflows a bank actually runs rather than a feature tour 

• Design and run proofs of concept, bake-offs, and tabletop exercises against criteria you helped the customer write, before a competitor writes them instead 

Enterprise evaluation 

• Own technical RFP and RFI responses, security questionnaires, penetration test and audit report reviews, resilience and exit planning questions, and vendor due diligence 

• Create technical diagrams, architecture illustrations, and visuals that make the response clear rather than long 

• Carry the technical case through enterprise architecture review boards, information security review, and procurement 

Banking service provider channel 

• Serve as the technical counterpart to a partner's product and engineering leadership through evaluation, integration design, and launch 

• Enable the partner's own sales engineers and solution consultants to position and demonstrate our capability without us in the room, and keep that enablement current as the product moves 

Competitive positioning 

• Maintain a working analysis of the field: incumbent full-stack providers with deep installed bases, modern-sounding platforms running on older cores under new ownership, the in-house build, and the systems integrator who proposes to modernize what the bank already owns 

• Know what each buyer already believes about that field, and position against the belief rather than the vendor. Understand where a competitor is genuinely better placed, and requalify rather than discount 

Marketing and product 

• Work with Marketing to produce technical thought leadership: articles, whitepapers, video scripts, case studies, and webinars. Speak at industry forums and events, and support analyst engagement 

• Carry the field's evidence back into Product: what was asked for, what was doubted, what lost, and what the roadmap has to answer next 

• 12+ years of experience across technology and commercial roles, combining more than one of software development and engineering, product management, pre-sales, and customer success – ideally in a banking tech company 

• Substantial experience selling technology into banks or credit unions in the US, with a track record of carrying deals through enterprise architecture, information security, and procurement review 

• Breadth across the bank technology stack: core, deposits, payments, cards, lending, and digital channels, with genuine hands-on depth in at least two of them 

• Experience with core or platform migration and coexistence in a live institution, from either side of the table, is strongly preferred 

• A degree in computer science or engineering is essential