The Career Map Less Travelled: Where Technical Acumen Meets Business Acumen
My experience in a niche engineering role — Sales Applications Engineering, often referred to as Proposal or Tender Engineer.
I want to share my experience in a niche engineering role called Sales Applications Engineering, often referred to as Proposal or Tender Engineer. This passage explores my experiences in a niche role within industrial companies.
An Engineer that writes Engineering Contracts? What an unusual profession…
Yes, it is an unusual profession; not everyone who graduates from university instinctively chooses to become a proposal engineer as a goal in mind. Usually, it’s more often the norm that new engineering graduates compete in graduate schemes, go to their pre-determined rotations, then choose which department suits them best to pursue deep domain expertise.
I actually came across this role from an entrepreneurial friend of mine during my build-up into engineering foundations; he was a Sales Applications Engineer. He talked about the exciting incentives you get, a boost of compensation, straight out of engineering school.
Through self-reflection, my interest was always in how companies work, like understanding business operations, i.e. improving EBITDA margins and how engineering applications work, a mixture of business and engineering. This led to my decision to try it out for myself. I am an individual who likes to see the “bigger picture” into solving problems. I enjoy being a problem solver across boundaries and leading people and projects. It was quite a match, and a Proposal Engineer just does exactly that.
You’re a Proposal Engineer, who are you marrying?
A proposal engineer is not about marriage (or weddings, engagements). It’s entirely a business meaning, a formal offer to a firm or client, outlining scope, technical approach, project schedules and modelling costs.
The best analogy I can think of is that you’re more of an underwriter like those in the finance/insurance/law sectors, but instead you’re in the engineering sectors within defence, space and energy.
So, what do Proposal Engineers really do?
In brief, the Proposal/Applications Engineer’s core function is to create a technical contract by bridging the gap between sales and engineering. They ensure that the promises the sales team makes to the client align with what the business can actually deliver.
It’s expected that you will be leading strategic bids and defining Scope of Work to meet the requirements for the client. You will be responsible for creating a winning bid strategy, which is a comprehensive, planned approach and determines what value means to the client.
You will be identifying project risks, like how project managers actively assess risks during project execution. What a Proposal Engineer does is to pre-determine these risks beforehand and estimate project schedule completion. Proposal Engineers have the responsibility to cover and hedge all areas of risk, either systematic or unsystematic risks that could jeopardise the project.
As a Proposal Engineer, you spend more time on doing your due diligence and managing communications. You are often seen interacting with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) like chief principals, consultants or engineering managers to optimise your technical solutions, and presenting to the C-suite dependent upon your bid if it’s a high-value contract.
This is a multidisciplinary role; therefore, grasping the fundamental concepts of mechanical, electrical, software development, etc. will give you an edge. In addition, a grasp of commercial and financial terms too will give you an advantage.
You would be developed into a hybrid engineer and be described as a generalist, or what I prefer to call it, a ‘Jack of all trades, master of none, but often sometimes better than master of one’. This role has given me the opportunity to work with some of the best engineering managers and sales entrepreneurs in the engineering industry, quite a unique experience.
This job does require you to be a bit entrepreneurial, adapting to change, achieving immediate deadlines and execution. The role can sometimes be high stress, dependent upon the business’s demands and your experience within the role. It’s inevitable that you would be working 80–100 hour work weeks to achieve the sales team’s opportunistic deadline. I do have some mental models, frameworks and techniques to overcome this, but I’d like to share this in the next write-up.
My best lesson learned during my time as a Proposal/Applications Engineer at my previous firm, taught by one of my mentors, was to ‘Work Simple, Not Complicated’.