A day in life as a Sales Engineer at Tinfoil Security with Lily Sellers
Describe your role as a sales engineer at Tinfoil Security. What kind of projects do you work on?
As a sales engineer at Tinfoil Security my primary role is to have one hand in technical sales and the other in engineering features for current and prospective enterprise customers. It’s my job to oversee sales and step in to identify feature requests, then build them out. For example, if a company is using Jenkins for all of their continuous integration and testing, they will most likely want to include vulnerabilities found by Tinfoil’s tests with their other tests. That’s an integration that can be built.
What other tasks do you take on other than sales engineering?
Since we’re a small start-up, I often take on a wide variety of tasks. I’ve written contracts and invoices, started and closed deals, sent cold sales emails, gone on-site to large customers for meetings, helped to onboard new hires, been on demo and sales calls, pushed random bug fixes, investigated potential false positives, replied to support tickets, responded to and created contract redlines, you name it!
Describe a typical day at Tinfoil.
The first thing we do when we get into work is daily scrum. This way we can be updated on what everyone did the previous day and is planning to do next. It also gives us the chance to talk with people about any roadblocks. After that, it depends. There’s always a lot going on at once, which keeps things exciting. Like, preparing for a security conference in between the tasks you’re working on that day. Then there's been days where a film crew has come in an hour’s notice to interview our cofounder about *insert hacking related news story here*, so that’s pretty cool.
Check out some of their press on crunchbase.
Tinfoil is a very respected and up-and-coming cyber security startup in the industry. Where do you see Tinfoil in 10 years?
In 10 years from now, I see Tinfoil adding a lot of new products. Right now we focus mainly on DAST, which in my opinion is the backbone of vulnerability testing. I think to take Tinfoil to the next level, we’ll look at ways to innovate in areas like SAST as well since a lot of companies use both DAST and SAST tools. I also see us growing in size a lot and having several offices. We have a lot of room to grow now.
What were some challenges you encounter as a sales engineer?
The main challenge I face as a sales engineer especially at a start up is the ambiguity that comes along with the title… not that “software sorceress” (the title I use on my business cards) remedies any of that ambiguity. Some sales engineers are focused more on engineering (like me), some more on technical sales, etc.. Because of this, it's important for me to communicate with customers such that they know we can discuss engineering and feature requests.
What was the interview process like at Tinfoil?
For engineering, the process is very similar to the majority of software engineering interviews with a focus on algorithms, data structures and architecture/systems.
What made you passionate about working and getting involved in the cyber security industry?
I'd always been interested in the cyber security industry, but didn't pursue that interest until I had already graduated with a degree in Computer Science & Statistics. After that I applied to Tinfoil, and when I was hired I taught myself and continue to learn more each day. I'm passionate about protecting our customers and educating people on ways they can protect themselves from hackers.
What are some current cyber security trends going on in the industry these days? What are some of the biggest problems you see in cyber security?
More companies than ever are interested in sec tools due to the rise of technology and media reports on data breaches in large companies and within the government. One of the biggest problems I see in cyber security now are tests and standards that give a false sense of security, like PCI compliance. Having any kind of security is a good thing in general, but the problem arises when you use these standards as a check list, assume you are secure, and forget about security until there's some form of update in standards. It's important to stay ahead of hackers by monitoring all changes in code for vulnerabilities, hiring pen-testers, and being amongst the first to know when a new vulnerability has been publicly released.
How do you think Tinfoil will take part to help render the future of cyber security?
I think we're already making a big difference, and that as we grow we will be able to impact more and more customers at the individual, team, and company level.
Any advice or suggestions for our non-technical readers who want to get involved with sales engineering?
If you like software engineering and communicating directly with customers and managers, this is definitely a role you want to consider. I'd also highly recommend looking into it if you enjoy seeing how different parts of a company work together, especially in a start up setting, since you get to be involved in a lot of areas.
If you want your startup to be interviewed, please reach out to me at taehong.min18@outlook.com. Thanks!