I wasn’t always a sales engineer at an ad tech company. Just over two years ago, I was sitting in a very different kind of engineering office—an outfitted shipping container on a drillship in the Gulf of Mexico—running the measurement and logging operations for Chevron’s Deepwater project. I’d started work as a field engineer at Chevron after a few post-college jobs and internships, led by a desire to build awesome things and work on challenges that required technical prowess, creativity and the ability to think quickly. My ability to monitor and manage our drilling operation could make the difference between a dull day on the job and a catastrophic accident. After a year and a half in the field, I had earned the autonomy to lead a team to support tools and operations critical to the drilling process, but I was beginning to realize that I might have reached the ceiling for engineering challenges in this field.
Could I have foreseen that I would end up applying those same skills to client needs in advertising? Absolutely not. Could I have imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I would find “sales engineering” more engaging and exciting than working with enormous machines and processes? Turns out I had a lot to learn.
At the point in my previous career that I was most seriously considering changing course, serendipity (or fate) stepped in. An old partner-in-crime, from my performing arts days at Penn, was looking for a Jr. Solutions Engineer for his team at an ad tech company, according to his most recent Facebook post. Though I’d never heard of ad tech, I was at least some kind of engineer. I figured I had nothing to lose and reached out. This conversation with Prasanna Swaminathan was the first of many that convinced me that ad tech at MediaMath would be the place where I could take on fascinating and challenging technical problems, and have the kind of career growth potential that had seemed inconceivable when I spent most of my time on an isolated oil rig at sea.
Each conversation I had during the application process was more engaging than the last, sort of like a great date. Sometimes they would challenge me with something like a computational data efficiency problem. On another occasion, we got entirely sidetracked and I spent 10 minutes explaining and diagramming how sonic logging works (for the curious, sonic logging is a way to detect lithology and rock formations while drilling). When I was invited to the office to meet the team, I immediately felt energized and inspired, and the cultural dynamic that surrounded me felt like an organic fit.
You could imagine my disappointment when the recruiter called me a week later and told me that they weren’t considering me for the Jr. Solutions Engineer position, but instead wanted to hire me as a “Sales Engineer.” (“How could my two Java credits and high school C++ course not qualify me to play with the technology myself?!”) Nevertheless, I discussed the proposal with my soon-to-be manager, Michael Hauptman. To my surprise, he seemed to have given such careful consideration to not only my strengths, but also my goals and potential. He seemed genuinely interested in putting me in a position where I could advance quickly while learning new skills and trying my hand at some intriguing technical problems.
I’ve got to hand it to him—Sales Engineering has really suited me. My role essentially reconciles the needs of our clients with the capabilities and services we can provide, with more of a focus on advanced or highly technical use cases. On a day-to-day basis, I generally split my time between solving technical problems with the dedicated integrations engineers, and working with Platform Solutions and Sales to support clients strategically and tactically. As I had hoped, the technical and client-facing responsibilities from my previous role translated across industries surprisingly well. Two years and two roles later, I still often think about how so much of what I’ve learned and accomplished can be attributed to seeing the right post at the right time (meta!).