What engineer job involves a lot of sales?

Yes, usually they are called pre-sales tech, or solutions architect, integration consultant etc. Solution architect can also be an inside role too so you have to check how that JD is written.

Usually what you want to do is get in to one of the pre-sales teams so you are part of the sales process but can still stay technical. This will let you see the sales process and start developing new skills. This is usually focused on the enterprise market where the pricing justifies a more expensive sales process.

You can also do this at a startup but it won't teach you sales typically. Startups are learning how to sell themselves usually, so they don't have a mature sales process or people so if you are wanting to develop those skills go to one of the big consulting firms, or CRM companies etc.

Yes, become a co-founder or act as one by entirely, completely, unapologetically owning the product by going way beyond the distance regular people go: code, architecture, features, marketing, UX, the business side of things, the pitch, legal, relations with prospects, knowledge management, documentation, building tooling for colleagues, building deployment pipelines, making it easier for co-workers to do their work, disseminating knowledge, living good engineering practices, enabling colleagues in areas where you're better, simplifying onboarding, training documents, sales copy, story of the product, everything and I mean everything down to the minute details legal documents have or the phrasing of responses to non-pursuit towards job applications. Own everything.

As far as I can tell, many things are limited only by the amount of complexity people are willing to handle and the workload they can support. If you're okay pulling a work-day with co-workers and then another one when they leave, then we understand each other. Some people can pull off 16 hour work days or more, even during the week-ends, even during holidays and think about the product all the time. Some are great and can do that in 4 hours, I personally can't.

Find things that suck, fix them, institutionalize that knowledge, document everything, prepare for the eventuality of your disappearing, build an organization, train people to think like that, read a whole lot, become good a things, add a lot of value, become someone you would fear if they were a competitor, have very high expectations of yourself and be afraid to disappoint yourself tomorrow, experiment, demonstrate by building things and implementing things, not just as "ideas" but actual outputs, either codes/graphics/copy/documentation/training manuals/videos. Go for it.

Sales Engineer is a very real title and role. Basically, you work with salespeople to spec out a system and help the customer understand what would be involved in rollout and how their system would be integrated with yours. This is most common in enterprise sales.

Programming is usually very far from sales, I haven't seen such a position yet (well unless you're a founder as somebody else mentioned). However, as others mentioned already, you could be a technical salesperson. It does not involve programming, but you need to understand the tech well enough to be able to talk about it with actual developers on the client's side.

Typically, you will look for a "Sales Engineer" role where you are involved in Sales process discussing detailed technical requirements with the prospects.

Consultancy work, especially if you are at senior/lead/principal level in many cases involves sales work.

Try Searching: jobs, engineering + enterprise sales + Chicago

*Yes, I looked you up. I'm that good.

Promise not a stalker!

Founder.