Ardoq
London (EMEA)
Sales Engineer (Solution Architect) × 1
A Sales Engineer placed at Ardoq — a cloud-based enterprise architecture platform — at a point of significant growth that would culminate in a $125M Series D raise in 2022. The hire required genuine EA credibility in a market where few candidates carry it.
The Challenge
Why this brief was hard
Enterprise architecture is a specialist domain. Ardoq's platform helps large organisations map their technology, processes, and people so they can make better decisions about transformation and change — a product that sells into CIOs, enterprise architects, and digital transformation leads who know the space deeply and have little patience for pre-sales people who don't. Finding a Sales Engineer who could operate credibly in that context is not straightforward. The candidate pool for EA pre-sales in London is narrow: TOGAF and ArchiMate certification is rare, and genuine experience running technical evaluations with senior enterprise architecture teams is rarer still. Ardoq was growing fast — the company would go on to raise $125M in its Series D the following year — and the Sales Engineer hire needed to be someone who could hold their own in front of demanding enterprise buyers while the company's EMEA presence was still being built.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Ikuto sourced candidates with a focus on genuine EA credibility — not SaaS pre-sales generalists who could learn the domain, but people who had demonstrable depth in enterprise architecture frameworks and had sat in front of EA and IT leadership teams in a pre-sales capacity. Saad Mughal came with TOGAF Certified Practitioner and ArchiMate 2 certifications alongside extensive experience across the SaaS customer journey. That combination — real EA knowledge plus commercial pre-sales instinct — was exactly what the brief required. Every candidate was screened before presentation, with particular attention to how they engaged with the technical and organisational complexity that Ardoq's enterprise buyers brought to evaluation cycles.
The Outcome
What we delivered
One placement made into the Sales Engineer (Solution Architect) role. Saad joined Ardoq's EMEA team and has remained with the business — a strong indicator of fit on both sides. Ardoq went on to close a $125M Series D led by One Peak and EQT Growth in March 2022, valuing the company at over $300M, and has continued to grow its enterprise customer base globally.
“Ikuto found us someone who genuinely understood enterprise architecture — not just the product, but the world our customers live in. That credibility matters enormously when you're selling into EA and CIO teams, and it's not something you can fake in a demo.”
Robin Fitzhugh
Ardoq
The Client
Ardoq
London (EMEA)
At a Glance
1 SE
Placement
2021
Year
$125M
Series D (2022)
Long-term
Retention
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