Solutions engineer · technical sales
I’m the solutions engineer in the room when a technical buyer needs convincing. I run the demos, answer the awkward questions, and turn “we’re not sure yet” into “where do we sign”, mostly for enterprise accessibility teams who’ve heard every pitch before. My edge? I build the tools I demo, so I actually know how they work.
The technical credibility behind the sales pitch. I don’t just demo tools, I build them. Most of this was made for clients or behind closed doors, so the details are deliberately fuzzy. The shape of each thing is real; the names just aren’t.
Interactive models that put hard numbers on a fuzzy question: what’s the business case for accessibility, and how mature is an organisation really? I run these live in technical evaluations to turn sceptical buyers into internal champions.
A gamified, multi-role ramp app: learning paths, spaced-repetition drills, role-specific quizzes, manager dashboards, streaks. Built to turn a messy onboarding process into something a whole team actually finishes.
Record a user journey once, then automatically catch accessibility regressions on every change, for web and mobile. Shareable reports, CI-friendly, so fixes stay fixed instead of quietly breaking again.
A library of reusable AI “skills” that automate real work: research, reporting, brand-consistent content, competitive analysis. Designed to be shared across a team, not locked in one person’s head.
Guitar Hero, but for fingerspelling. Your webcam becomes the controller: real-time hand tracking reads the sign you’re making while letters fly at you in time with the beat. Built for both British and American sign alphabets, mostly for the joy of it.
Turning messy audit and usage data into clear, branded, interactive reports: the kind a non-specialist can open, understand, and act on without a translator in the room.
A mix of what fills my week now and what I’ve spent years getting good at.
Mechanical engineer, turned consultant, turned solutions engineer. The through-line: design thinking, and making complex things click for people.
Principal Solutions Engineer, EMEA
Helping enterprises shift accessibility left across web and mobile, and automate testing at scale.
Principal Solution Engineer · President, Abilityforce UK
Led technical sales for UK aerospace & defence and championed design thinking, alongside leading Salesforce’s UK disability-equality community as its President.
Managing Consultant · Senior Consultant · European Large-Deals Team
Championed design thinking with IBM’s biggest clients, led service-design engagements across energy, transport and public sector, and helped win over $500m of new business.
MEng, Mechanical Engineering · University of Sheffield
Plus the formative stuff: a nuclear-waste engineering challenge, research into tennis-court physics, and the customer-facing years every good SE quietly runs on.
Certified: IAAP CPACC (accessibility) · IBM Design Thinking Practitioner · CIMA management accounting · and a bit of French & Swedish
About
I’m a principal solutions engineer covering EMEA: the technical half of a sale, running the discovery, demos and proofs of concept, and being the calm voice when a deal gets complicated. But I got here the scenic route.
I trained as a mechanical engineer, then spent the best part of a decade in consulting and pre-sales, championing design thinking with some of IBM’s and Salesforce’s biggest clients, leading technical teams, and helping win some eye-watering deals. Somewhere along the way I realised the work I cared about most was the work that made things usable for more people.
At Salesforce I led its UK disability-equality community as President, and these days my domain is accessibility: making the web work for everyone, including people who navigate by keyboard, screen reader, or voice. The other constant is that I build. When I demo a tool, there’s a good chance I wrote it, and I care a lot about craft: the spacing, the focus states, the small details that make something feel considered.
This site is itself a small demonstration: hand-built as a single HTML file, fully keyboard operable, WCAG 2.2 AA in both light and dark, and it respects your reduced-motion and colour-scheme preferences. No trackers, no cookies, no build step.
Contact
Whether it’s an accessibility problem, a technical evaluation that needs winning, or an idea that needs building, I’d love to hear about it.
hi@chriskeene.meGoes straight to my inbox.