JJ Jenkins is a seasoned solutions engineer with experience across some of the most prominent API-first platforms in fintech, including Fiserv, DriveWealth, Gusto, and Alpaca. In this conversation, JJ shares how his role has evolved, the challenges of demoing technical products, and how Coast has become a core part of his workflow.
In your own words, what does a solutions engineer do at an API-first company?
One of my many responsibilities is to assist prospects and customers envision what they can build using a particular set of technology. Clients typically come to API-first companies with a problem, whether it's related to payroll, brokerage, or healthcare, and they're looking for a solution they don’t have to build from scratch. The job of a solutions engineer is to show how a platform's APIs can address that problem.
You’ve worked in solutions engineering across multiple API-first companies like Fiserv, DriveWealth, Gusto, and Alpaca. How has that shaped the way you approach your role today?
In the past, you could describe the functionality of an API to a developer without necessarily showing it in action. Today, that’s no longer enough. There's real value in being able to demonstrate utility live. "Seeing is believing" and this still holds true, especially in tech. Showing something tangible helps people actually understand what your product or solutions solves.
How do you balance the technical depth required for your role with the storytelling needed to win deals?
I try to help the audience step into two personas: the client who is building / integrating the technology and the end customer who is benefiting from the solution. From the end-customer perspective, they need to understand how their users would interact with the API to solve a real-world problem, like running payroll or buying a stock. As the partner, they need to understand what it takes to integrate that technology: what orchestration is required, what data is needed, what events can be listened for, and so on. It’s about meeting both perspectives with the right level of technical detail and narrative clarity.
What are the most challenging parts of your job?
One of the biggest challenges is ensuring the prospect truly understands their end customers and the problem they’re solving for. Bridging those worlds takes work.
Another challenging part of my role is understanding my prospective audience and identifying how to communicate with them best. Different stakeholders require different communication styles; executives care about the business impact (how brokerage features make an app sticker), engineers care about the integration and how the technology works.
On the flip side, what moments in your work give you the most energy?
It’s energizing when I can stop focusing on maintaining or curating a demo for a prospect and shift my attention to the actual deal. Coast empowers me to do this. I'm no longer buried in code, so I can think more strategically about identifying champions, addressing blockers, and moving the conversation forward.
You’ve been involved in large, high-stakes deals. What does having a personalized, interactive demo mean in that context?
Personalized demos are everything. When someone sees their own brand, their own flow, it naturally becomes theirs. That attachment drives understanding and buy-in. Coast enables that easily. It’s not just about the demo working, it’s about making the prospect feel the solutions as if they were the end customer.
Before Coast, what did your process for building demos look like?
It was a mess—waving hands, powerpoints, and if we were lucky, a working demo environment. At previous companies we had internally built tools, but they weren’t scalable and required a lot of maintenance. We had to record videos of it instead of sharing something interactive like Coast. It wasn’t brandable either.
You’d run into issues with things breaking, environments going stale, and the engineering team constantly needing to maintain them. And if someone clicked the wrong thing during a demo, you could lose the whole thread.
Keeping demo environments updated took time away from actually selling. Every update required backend changes, and we had to coordinate with engineering. Coast removes that friction. If my engineering team changes an API call, I just update the API in Coast and you're done. There’s no infrastructure to maintain.
Was there a moment that made you think, “This could change how I work”?
Yes, when I stopped worrying about whether the demo would break and started focusing on the deal. Coast got my head out of the weeds. It freed me up to think about who the quiet stakeholders are, who might be a blocker, and who our champions are.
Can you walk us through how Coast has helped you save time on a deal?
The biggest time-saver is repeatability. Coast allows me to clone existing templates and tweak them slightly for different use cases, like adding two extra steps for a crypto onboarding flow versus a stock onboarding flow. I don’t have to start from scratch every time.
How has Coast changed the way you collaborate with sales, product, or marketing teams?
Coast allows me to build key functionalities right into the demo, allowing myself to dogfood out a feature and give feedback to the product team. With sales and marketing we can strategy on the GTM strategy of key features and functionality we want to showcase to prospects.
Have you noticed any impact on how champions inside customer organizations share your demos?
Yes, especially when the demo is simple and clear. If they don’t have to input anything and the story is obvious, it gets shared more widely. But once you ask users to enter data, or the flow gets too complex, you start to lose the audience. Coast makes it easier to keep the value proposition in direct sight.
You’ve seen Coast across multiple companies. What’s made it a “must-have” in your toolkit?
Coast is incredibly flexible, but it’s the simplicity that makes it powerful. In each company I’ve worked at, it has really helped our prospects understand how our solutions work. You can build anything but really shouldn't. I keep each demo focused on a single use case to drive immediate understanding and trust with my audience. I’m only showcasing what they actually care about for their use case.
How does Coast help you scale your impact as one person supporting many opportunities?
By making demos repeatable. You can clone a baseline, modify a few steps, and ship it. It’s scalable and saves a ton of time.
If Coast disappeared tomorrow, what would break first in your workflow?
My ability to demo with confidence. I’d be back to managing environments, worrying about updates, chasing engineers. My focus would shift from deals to debugging. I’d prefer not to think about it actually.
For other solutions engineers at API-first companies, what would you say about integrating Coast into their workflow?
It’s a no-brainer. And then once they start using it, I’d tell them to always think about their audience, not just their AE or your exec team. Coast gives you the freedom to build anything, but that doesn’t mean you should. Simplicity wins.
How do you see tools like Coast changing the SE role in the next 3–5 years?
Honestly, I see the SE and AE roles starting to collapse into each other. Selling technical products means you need both skill sets - technical depth and human connection. Whether SEs become more commercially minded or AEs become more technical, the line is blurring.
“In the end, we’re all just people selling technology to people.”
JJ’s experience underscores a central truth in solutions engineering: simplicity drives clarity, and clarity wins deals. Coast empowers solutions engineers to stay focused on what matters: identifying customer problems, building trust with stakeholders, and closing high-impact deals.
