SE vs customer engineering vs solution architect

The Three Adjacent Roles

Telecom and adjacent tech companies use three overlapping titles for customer-facing technical work. Solution Engineer (SE) or Sales Engineer — the canonical pre-sales role, focused on individual deals, working closely with account executives, owning the technical narrative through discovery, design, demo, proposal, and close. Customer Engineer (CE) — the modern Google/AWS-coined term often applied to deeper technical engagement at strategic accounts; can be pre-sales (different brand for the same role) or post-sales (technical account management for live customers). Solution Architect (SA) —…