Engineer at NetApp

Job description

Job Summary:

As a Solutions Engineer for NetApp, you will utilize your strong technical competency and consultative skills to support sales goals and deliver successful outcomes at new and existing Customers. You will work on cross-functional teams to create a strategy that provides the best solutions to Customers. Working together with your sales colleagues and/ Partners, you will become acquainted with customers’ business requirements, technical needs, systems, environment and service history, enabling you to present targeted solutions with demonstrable ROI or other business benefits.

Essential Functions:

• Business Solution Focus; Business and Financial Acumen. And the expectation of selling Service as a Solution
• Customer Development; Creating Demand, Developing Additional Opportunities, and Customer Relationship Building (expanding relationships beyond known customers – up the hierarchy and across into other business units)
• Critical and Strategic Thinking; Effectively Deconstruct and Analyze Problems. Customer Strategic short- and long-term goals in Account Planning
• Lead value-based, pre-sales engagements direct or together with Partners
• Utilize consultative skills and techniques to draw out Customer pain points and desired outcomes
• Converse comfortably at multiple levels and across multiple teams at existing and new Customers; e.g. from operations staff up to executives, across infrastructure, service management, cloud and other teams.
• Run proof-of-concepts (POCs) to demonstrate the value of our solutions
• Leveraging POC or other data, help customers build business cases and ROI models to justify the purchase of our solutions
• Ability to effectively communicate NetApp's technical value proposition, either in-person and via WebEx
• 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

Responsibility and Interaction:

• Manages opportunity life cycle from initial contact, qualification to sale through implementation
• Architects and validates complete NetApp and Partner solutions
• Lead and/or make significant contributions in response to RFPs, RFQs, and RFIs
• Bears technical responsibility for sizing and interoperability of proposed configurations
• Maintains installed base at assigned Customer base (renewal, refresh, capacity).
• Drives NetApp solutions deeper and wider into the Customer base
• Acts as the Trusted Advisor to Customer and Partner technical teams, develops customer champions
• Leads technical strategy (plan) and execution in accounts, territories or vertical
• Acts as a coach to other team members and contributes to opportunities outside of Focus Accounts
• Presents, positions and demonstrates NetApp technologies, solutions and services
• Articulates business value, and provides consultative selling approach at the executive, management, and operations levels
• Handles objections at all levels within Customer and Partner organization
• Manages feature-based PVRs (Price Variation Requests)
• Drives all aspects pertaining to onsite evaluations and Proof of Concepts (POC)
• Drives and participates in EBC visits with Customers
• Acts as thought leader /subject matter expert (internal and external) within designated segment, industry or technology area
• Work is accomplished without considerable direction.
• Exerts significant latitude in determining objectives of assignment
• Interacts up to senior management and executive level at Customers and Prospects
• Collaborates with cross-functional teams internally and with Partners
• Interacts and collaborates with sales and channel management internally
• Tactically builds a network outside to support business needs
• Has strong internal and external relationships at senior levels.
• Acts to ensure common understanding across teams
• Builds and maintains an internal network with Global functions (technical and product marketing, alliances and channel organization, Product Operations etc.)

Required Knowledge:

• Specialized knowledge in breadth or depth in the following areas:
• 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, KVM, HyperV…)
• Understands both traditional IT infrastructures, as well as public cloud services (AWS/Azure)
• Significant knowledge about NetApp competitive landscape
• Perseverance, ability and eagerness to learn new technologies/skills fast
• Ability to adopt to changing environment and priorities
• Good time management skills
• Excellent analytical capabilities
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Expert at whiteboarding, presentations and live + remote demonstrations
• Ability to pro-actively take account ownership.
• Advanced competence with various tools, procedures, sales skills and business acumen

Education & Experience:

• A Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering; or related field is required.
• 8-12 years demonstrated presales / systems engineering experience
• Experience which demonstrates a significant level of expertise in technical specifications required to sell NetApp products and services is required