Yes, exactly my confusion. From what little they were able to tell me about the role, it was treated 100% as an engineering role and supposedly followed their engineering interview process (though one of the team members told me the role actually required very little programming), but was technically part of the sales team.

Sales engineer by the sound of it

Please, they prefer to be identified as "solutions architects".

I don't know why you put that in scare-quotes. Solutions Architect is a common role in large software companies, and different than Sales Engineer.