Systems Engineer, South Africa at Pure Storage

ABOUT THE ROLE…

• As a Presales Systems Engineer you will leverage your technical expertise to pilot the sales & adoption of our PURE solutions with prospects and existing customers in the Enterprise, Commercial or Public sector. 
• You collaborate with customers to understand their business goals, their pain points, and propose creative solutions in collaboration with our key alliance partners. You will work closely with other pre-sales, sales, partner sales & enablement, marketing, and leadership team members to help develop and grow business with the full PURE portfolio of solutions.

SHOULD YOU ACCEPT THIS CHALLENGE...

In this role, you'll:

• Develop an exhaustive understanding of what drives a customer’s business and what motivates their decision making
• Passionately bring to light the advantages of a Pure Storage solution
• Refine sales strategy and tactics, taking command of technical responsibilities
• Delight customers and teammates with your technical leadership and domain expertise on storage products, distributed storage architectures, file systems, and competitive storage offerings in the DAS, NAS and SAN product spaces
• Take control of evaluations and benchmarks, system configurations, and system installations
• Build and deliver technical product and architecture presentations with vigor to customers and lock in the technical win with clients and prospective accounts
• Capture requirements and translate Customer’s business needs into innovative solutions to accelerate their growth and capacity
• Author responses to RFI & RFPs
• Seek out and spur new opportunities for interoperability, functional, and performance testing/validation
• Promote mutual roadmap and planning exchanges
• Liaise with product and technical marketing to produce materials (i.e. whitepaper, web presentations) that support overall alliance plans and objectives
• Stay current with the competition and ensure that materials accurately reflect the latest, differentiated solution positioning
• Move with market trends and competitive landscape to promote thought leadership within our organization

WHAT YOU’LL NEED TO BRING TO THIS ROLE...

• You will be based in Cape Town or Johannesburg. As this is an office-centric role, you are expected to be present in the office for 3 days a week. As outlined in Pure's Hybrid Work Policy, there will be variations over periods of time, depending on business need.
• Pre-sales experience is required
• 5-10 years minimum experience supporting the sales of enterprise storage, networking or systems solutions to a combination of large enterprise accounts and data centers
• Deep understanding of the architecture, design and implementation of multi-tiered client/server and web-based computing solutions
• Prior experience in targeting new prospects and converting them into clients
• Contribute significant portions and/or lead responses to RFPs, RFQs and RFIs
• Superior knowledge of current and emerging storage architectures (FC, iSCSI, NAS, OSD, SAN)
• UNIX OS, NFS file systems and UNIX distributed network environment
• Installation/configuration of distributed computing, multiprocessing, virtual memory subsystem, storage subsystems architecture, shared memory architectures, cache architectures, windowing systems
• Strong knowledge of digital transformation to a Cloud Native architecture, On-Prem, Public Cloud, Provisioning Automation, and Containers
• Knowledge of VMWare, Local Area Networking, Ethernet, TCP/IP and general networking
• Excellent verbal and written interpersonal skills
• BS in CS, EE or other technical degree and/or equivalent experience
• Familiarity with modern web architecture a plus (LAMP stack, scale-out vs scale-up architectures, NoSQL alternatives)
• Application knowledge is highly desirable