Title:  Solutions Engineer

Job Summary

As a Solutions Engineer, you will utilize your strong technical competencies and customer service orientation to provide the highest level of technical consultation to sales teams to support sales goals. You will work on cross-functional teams including Sales, Product Marketing, Services and Engineering to create a strategy that provides the best solutions to customers. You will become intimately acquainted with the customer's business requirements, technical needs, systems, environment and service history, enabling you to present targeted business solutions. 

Essentiel Functions:

Solutions Engineers work with NetApp potential customers and the assigned Account/Sales Team by providing expertise in the following areas:

• Work closely with sales as a consultant to understand prospect’s technical needs related to a specific market or specific product.
• Perform consultative selling of optimum support and system solutions.
• Manage and evolve a comprehensive technology collaboration and support.
• Provide technical consultation/education to the Sales team and keep them apprised on new product information.
• Lead value-based, pre-sales engagements direct or together with Partners.
• Participate in customer evaluations and proof of concepts for deploying test systems.
• Plan, conduct and direct projects to support sales efforts and address future customer needs.  
• Project plan includes costs, staffing, technical leadership and project evaluation.
• Lead and/or make significant contributions in response to RFPs, RFQs, and RFIs.
• Work with multiple extended teams within NetApp to deliver successful outcomes for the business.
• Execute effectively on multiple parallel engagements - excellent prioritization skills is a must have requirement.
• Run proof-of-concepts (POCs) to demonstrate the value of our solutions
• Keep apprised of all new product features and fixes.

Job Requirements

• Expert in a specific product or a specific market.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills. 
• Good interpersonal communication and customer service skills are needed in order work successfully with prospects, customers, and cross functional teams to meet increased sales goals.
• Previous work experience with a direct sales model including large account selling methodologies.
• Account management and project management experience.
• Strong aptitude for learning new technologies and understanding how to utilize them in a customer facing environment.
• Ability to follow standard engineering principles and practices.
• Creative approach to problem solving.
• Ability to effectively communicate NetApp's technical value proposition, either in-person and via virtual customer meetings.
• Travel to the prospective customer's domestic sites and other global sites as necessary.

Responsibility & Interaction:

Responsibility: 

• Having broad expertise or unique knowledge, this individual uses their skills to contribute to the development of company objectives and principles, and to achieve sales function goals in creative and effective ways.
• Is responsible for a specific geographical install base and large, complex, high visibility, strategic, or tactically important accounts.  

 
Interaction:

• This individual effectively works with, and influences senior internal personnel within the function, and employees in other functions that support the sales effort, and has direct customer contact.
• May successfully coordinate significant projects or initiatives across functional groups.
• Limited management supervision and direction is provided since this individual operates and drives results independently.
• The ideal candidate is a subject matter expert and strongly influences sales team decisions and initiatives. May also act as a team leader and major decision maker for team projects with significant interdependencies.

Required Knowledge:

• Specialized knowledge in breadth or depth in the following areas:
• Strong sales skills
• Network Architecture and Data Center Visualization
• Storage Networking and Data Management
• Storage Solutions for Video Surveillance and Bigdata/Analytics
• Hyperconverged and Software Defined Storage Solutions
• Hypervisors Knowledge (VMWare, Microsoft, KVM…)
• Understands both traditional IT infrastructures, as well as public cloud services (AWS/Azure)
• Technical experience with the following is a strong plus: iSCSI/FCoE storage, SPC performance benchmarks, database applications (SQL, Oracle, SAP), HCI, CI, kubernetes, docker, OpenStack, vCloud Director, etc.
• SaaS model sales, selling infrastructure as a service
• Significant knowledge about NetApp competitive landscape

Education & Experience:

• More than 5 years of experience is preferred.   
• A Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering; or related field is required.
• Experience which demonstrates a significant level of expertise in technical specifications required to sell NetApp products and services is required.