From Building Engineer to Selling Engineer: A PE's Voluntary Career Switch

Product engineer (PE) Kook Seunghyun, who spent 4.5 years building settlement systems on MyRealTrip's Payment Settlement Development team, has now moved to sales on the front lines of the Stay (accommodation) Growth Business team. This marks the first time at MyRealTrip that a PE has switched both team and job function to move into sales.

The move began with a sales and marketing role expansion opportunity that the company opened through an internal announcement. After seeing the announcement, it took less than 3 seconds to decide, and within four days he was actually out in the field, even going on a business trip. Team composition and scheduling were also sorted out quickly, and the job transition was completed within a month.

His time in settlement development wasn't simple backend operations. In an area where every won had to be reconciled to track exactly where travel product money should flow, not even a 1-won error was tolerated, and that precision work was both frustrating and formative, building a habit of digging into problems until they were fully resolved. He reflected that settlement development wasn't exactly a perfect fit for his personality, but it was a good domain for sharpening his attention to detail.

His reason for moving to sales was clear. In an era overflowing with solutions, he believed you have to encounter the real problem in the field first. Starting from a product or technology rarely produces a product that actually makes money, so he chose to start from the problem and find where AI could solve it.

Once he got into the field, he found the gap between sales and IT products was bigger than expected, and he confirmed a structure where the message gets slightly distorted along the way. He began working to narrow the gap between the field and the product—building a new accommodation listing catalog page, running several automation tasks at once, and even creating a brochure himself in a single day and sending it off to the print shop.

This career switch isn't just a personal choice—it's also an organizational experiment aimed at narrowing the distance between engineering and sales. Kook Seunghyun said he learns more in situations that differ from his expectations, summing it up by saying that the combination that fit him happened to be engineer × sales.