Pre Sales Consultant at Thales

Job Description
We are looking for someone enthusiastic and ambitious to join our Pre-Sales team to work with our Identity and Data Protection portfolio. In this position, you'll be working closely with the Sales team to respond to partner and customer needs for our solutions. The job is half about the soft skills and half about the technical skills; so you'll need to have both. Encryption and Cryptography underpin everything that we do, and so the more you understand about that, the better. Any experience in the field of Smart Cards, IAM, Hardware Security Modules and Key Management Solutions is a significant benefit, but not necessarily mandatory. We're more than happy to help you to get familiar with our products and provide you with all the knowledge that you need for your day to day work.

You'll first work closely with our prospects to gather information on their use-case, application environment and data flows to understand their needs fully. Once discovery is complete, you will be actively involved in the Proof of Concept phase of the sales engagement. Often, we need to provide assistance and advice on configuration or customisation to meet the prospects' needs with our very flexible solutions, and so you'll need to be hands-on. We interface with hundreds of 3rd-party applications and solutions, and you will undoubtedly come across many applications, integrations, features and APIs which aren't familiar. It's is both the excitement and the challenge of this position - the role suits someone keen to learn and interested in technology; the ability and desire to 'learn something new' will help.

The position is based in South Africa. You will need to be mobile as we have customers across the territory, we expect you'd be travelling approximately 50% of the time, but it will vary; some weeks more, some weeks less. Travel will be mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and less frequently within the Middle East.

Experience

• 5+ years' experience in a customer-facing pre-sales capacity in Information Security or a related field and skilled in presenting to both management (C-level) and technical personnel (developers, IT teams, etc.) with excellent verbal and objection-handling skills
• Technically hands-on with skills in problem-solving, architecture design and exposure to solution design
• Experience with crypto, data protection and identity access management solutions
• Experience with public and private cloud services, ideally across multiple CSPs (Azure, AWS, etc.)
• Technical bachelor degree (Comp Science/Engineering IS, Maths or similar) or equivalent work experience

Requirements

• Experience of Cryptography & Security; PKI, digital signatures, certificates, TLS, encryption and hashing techniques, ideally working knowledge of APIs such as PKCS #11, REST, Microsoft CSP/CNG, OpenSSL, Java JCA/JCE
• Experience with Identity Protection, Authentication solutions, Smartcards, or other Identity Management and Security products and solutions (Access management, single sign-on, identity federation, Multi-factor authentication)
• Experience with data discovery and classification solution when it comes to databases, file servers, network shares, big data
• Experience with data encryption and crypto key life cycle management when it comes to data at rest environments like databases, file servers, storage, hybrid cloud, big data.
• Experience with data in motion solutions when it comes WAN and SDN networks
• Experience with scripting and software development on both Windows and Linux systems
• Awareness of virtualisation products and cloud service provider offerings such as VMWare, HyperV, Xen, KVM, Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Docker, CloudFoundry, or similar