Day in the Life: Sales Engineer at AppNexus

If you have a passion for technology and business, you’ll want to follow our next alum on @PennCareerDay, Andrew Lenehan.  On Tuesday, December 4th, Andrew will talk about his career as a Sales Engineer with AppNexus, where they are “setting the standard for excellence in ad technology and helping the largest and most innovative companies in online advertising build their businesses.”  Read more about Andrew’s background below and remember to follow him after the Thanksgiving holiday!

Andrew graduated from Penn’s Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology with a BS in Economics (Marketing / Finance) and a BAS in Computer Science. He moved to New York to join the consulting team of a digital ad agency called Rosetta (since purchased by Publicis), where he worked with a phenomenally talented team within their Healthcare vertical. While he loved his time at Rosetta, he aspired to eventually try his hand at his own entrepreneurial venture, and wanted to gain some first hand experience in helping to build a company. Two years ago, Andrew switched industries into the advertising technology space to work for a startup called AppNexus, which provides companies like Rosetta with the cutting edge technology necessary to thrive in today’s digital media industry.

Andrew’s career focus also changed, from solving strategic business problem, to complex technical ones as a Support Engineer. With a solid technical foundation to build on, he wanted to shift into a more client-facing role and moved over to AppNexus’s Sales Engineering team. A Sales Engineer is responsible for qualifying and amplifying deals with prospective clients, acting as somewhat of a technical advisor to all parties involved. It has afforded him the ability to speak with executives from hundreds of companies, from early-stage startups to household names, and accelerated his professional growth significantly in a relatively short amount of time.He has loved his experience at AppNexus so far, and look forward to helping this market-making company continue to evolve in the coming years.