Pre-Sales Engineer - Legacy Modernization

About the job

We are a growing team in the exciting AI-augmented developer tools space, offering a unique opportunity to work on cutting-edge tech.

At Kodesage, you'll have the freedom and flexibility, in a passionate and seasoned team. We're looking for engineers who thrive on ownership and believe in a culture where the best ideas win. If you're ready to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment and make a real impact, we'd love to hear from you!

Why This Role Exists

Kodesage sells into complex enterprise environments where the buying decision is deeply technical. Our Account Executives need a strong technical partner who can walk into a room full of architects and development leads, understand their legacy landscape, and show them exactly how Kodesage solves their problem. That's you.

The Role

As a Presales Engineer, you work closely with our sales team to win deals. The position has two complementary dimensions. On the sales side, you'll partner with Account Executives on early-stage opportunities: joining discovery calls, understanding the customer's technical environment, running tailored demos, building technical proposals, and answering the hard questions that come up in enterprise evaluation processes (competitors, why AI, why Kodesage). You'll be the technical voice in the room that gives customers confidence we understand their world. On the delivery side, you'll occasionally support customer success: running onboarding workshops, leading customer enablement sessions, and helping teams get the most out of the platform. This keeps you close to real customer problems and makes you a better presales engineer. In a startup, the line between presales and post-sales is thin, and we like it that way.

Core Skills And Experience

Professional Experience: 10+ years in software engineering, with at least 5 of those in presales engineering, solutions engineering, solutions consulting, or a similar customer-facing technical role. You've been in the room when enterprise deals are won and lost, and you know why.

Legacy Systems Knowledge: Working knowledge of one or more legacy technology stacks: Oracle Forms & Reports, PL/SQL, APEX, COBOL, AS/400 (RPG), PowerBuilder, Informix 4GL, Delphi, Lotus Notes or similar. You don't need to be the deepest expert, but you need to understand the pain and speak the language.

Demo & Presentation Skills: You can take a complex platform and make it click for a technical audience in 30 minutes. You know how to tailor a demo to what the customer actually cares about, not run through a generic script and simply show features.

Technical Writing & Proposals: You can write clear, compelling technical proposals, solution briefs, and RFP responses. You know how to structure a document that makes the technical case and helps the customer's internal champion sell Kodesage internally.

Project Planning & Scoping: You can take a customer's legacy landscape and turn it into a realistic deployment plan: timelines, milestones, resource requirements, dependencies. You've scoped projects before and your estimates don't fall apart on contact with reality.

Enterprise Sales Cycles: You understand how enterprise procurement works -- security questionnaires, evaluation committees, technical due diligence, multi-stakeholder decision making. You've been through it and you know how to navigate it.

Discovery: You can run a technical discovery call, map out the customer's environment, and come back with a clear picture of what they need and how we fit.

Communication: Clear English and Hungarian communication. You can talk to a PL/SQL developer and a CIO in the same meeting and make both feel good.

Engineering Fundamentals: You can read code, understand system architecture, and have a meaningful technical conversation, you're not just reading slides.

Nice to Have

Consulting/Services Background: Experience at Oracle, Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, or a system integrator: you've seen enterprise IT from the inside.

Migration or Modernization Experience: You've been involved in legacy modernization projects, either on the vendor side or the customer side.

AI/LLM Curiosity: You don't need AI experience, but you're genuinely eager to learn how AI can transform legacy modernization and you can articulate that to customers.

CEE Market Knowledge: Existing relationships or familiarity with the Hungarian and Central European enterprise IT landscape (banking, government, energy, telecom).

Platform Stack: Some familiarity with Python, JavaScript, Docker, or Kubernetes: enough to understand deployment conversations.

What We Value

• Ownership: you take a deal from first technical call to close without waiting for someone to tell you what to do next.
• Customer Focus: you listen more than you talk, and your demos reflect what the customer needs, not what's easiest to show.
• Domain Mastery: you take pride in understanding legacy systems and can have a credible conversation with engineers who've been doing this for 20 years.
• Pragmatism: you focus on what wins the deal, not what looks impressive internally.
• Curiosity: you're interested in how AI changes what's possible in environments everyone else has written off.
• Collaboration: you work seamlessly with AEs, FDEs, and the product team: you're the bridge between what customers need and what we build.
• Builder's Mindset: you want to build something, not just work somewhere.
  

This Role Is for You If...

You've spent years in technical sales or consulting and you know the enterprise IT world well. You've done the demos, answered the hard questions, and helped close deals that others thought were too complex. You understand legacy systems: not because they're trendy, but because you've worked with the teams that depend on them. Now you want to join a company where your technical credibility directly drives growth, where you're not just supporting sales but shaping how the product goes to market. You want to be in a room where your opinion matters and where the work you do on a Tuesday afternoon shows up in next quarter's revenue.