Position Summary
The Pure Storage Field Solution Architect (FSA) is a senior level solution domain expert within the Global Sales Organization who will engage with customers, partners, and sales teams on strategic opportunities where the solution is in their area of expertise. This is a pre-sales role with the goal of building a successful Analytics solution for their respective markets. 

This would include defining the solutions strategy, conducting market research to identify the potential prospects, enabling the sales team to be able to effectively position and sell the analytics solution to potential customers. 

An FSA will drive an effective senior technical partner and alliance partner engagement and enablement program that grows Pure market share with alliance partners, and grows alliance partner affinity for Pure. They will also understand and disseminate competitive intelligence associated with their solution domain(s).

The FSA will have likely held an operational role in their specialism which provides them with the experience to deeply understand a customer’s challenges. More importantly they should be closely following the industry trends and sharing that expertise both internally and externally. 

The FSA has a key role in engaging customers in conversations about their full stack solution requirements, expected business outcomes and technology needs to help them deliver the optimal solution.

The FSA will be responsible for defining the Analytics Solution for their region. specific solution architecture for opportunities within their sales region. Including the full stack architecture, use of technology, integrations, implementation methods and testing.

The FSA will consult with customer technical architects in their domain, cross-sell Pure’s full solutions, services, subscriptions, and products portfolio and present Pure’s alliance credentials.

This senior level resource will be comfortable quickly establishing themselves as a thought leader and trusted advisor with their customer stakeholders. The FSA must be deeply knowledgeable in their technology domains and be comfortable presenting to customer IT executives, discussing processes with business managers, working with app teams on solutions architecture or with platform architects designing integrations – from boardroom to hackathons to storage.

Critically they will be accustomed to creating a value proposition that is directly linked to a customer’s solution requirements and issues. The successful FSA will be expert in quickly learning new solution domain developments and drivers and will be able to articulate how Pure and our partners can help them meet the customer’s goals. The FSA will keep up with the latest trends, be a disruptive thinker and have experience of driving technology change in organizations

The FSA will have gravitas and authenticity. They will be expected to have first class interpersonal skills combined with a comfortable, open, and compelling communication and presentation style. These skills, combined with proven domain knowledge, will create customer confidence in them and by extension Pure.

A FSA should maintain relationships with several customer solution domain leaders and meet on a regular basis to better understand the market and customer challenges and to cultivate opportunities.

Diplomacy/Empathy or Emotional Quotient (EQ). The role of FSA requires a high degree of diplomacy and a strong EQ. It is imperative that we can look at our value propositions from the viewpoint of our customers, therefore empathy is critical. Being able to represent the needs of the customer into Pure will also need a high degree of EQ.

The FSA will produce solution collateral for their customers in the form of presentations, short papers, demonstrations, proofs of concepts etc.

These can be harvested back into Pure for reuse. They will also be an external influencer in the form of social media content, blogs, webinars, speaking at industry events and publishing whitepapers. The FSA is also an internal influencer within Pure’s technical community helping to drive SE transformation and upleveling.

The FSA will work in close partnership with the PBG organization (specifically the Solutions and Alliances BUs) to shape and distribute technical strategy to the field and drive PBG campaigns and market initiatives.

They will participate in the overall sales to PBG/BU feedback loop, establishing credibility and trust with key PBG leaders, and with key sales and SE leaders. The FSA will create, refine, and own a framework for collecting and prioritizing market and solution feedback from the field. They will broadcast solutions roadmap current state,prioritization, and changes back to the field, while minimizing field feedback that circumvents this process.

The FSA will be a believer in lifelong learning. Personal development will take up ~10% of their time. They will also attend industry conferences and disseminate the information that they have gathered to their peers and colleagues. This will also support the up leveling of the SEs. The FSAs will be responsible for the mentoring and development of SEs, sharing of best practices, collateral, and enablement. The FSAs will also lead the virtual technical communities.

The FSAs will establish clear requirements with Pure Solutions Engineering for Pure labs, remote demonstrations, solutions engineering and SE enablement to drive adoption of solutions.

 

Primary Duties / Responsibilities

• Develop and implement strategies to grow the storage platform business in the area of data analytics.
• Conduct market research to identify potential clients and opportunities within the data analytics industry.
• Develop and expand relationships with key Pure Storage Alliance Analytics partners as well as industry influencers
• Empower Sales and Technical teams to successfully sell our portfolio through leveraging analytics use cases. Through delivering technical training, direct customer engagement as well as building strategic customer relationships
• Uncover customer needs and requirements related to data analytics for the sales/SE team to develop customized solutions leveraging the Pure Storage Platform.
• Collaborate with the product development team to enhance the storage platform's capabilities for data analytics applications.
• Provide expertise and guidance to clients on data analytics best practices, tools, and technologies.
• Conduct sales presentations and demonstrations to showcase the value of the storage platform for data analytics needs.
• Monitor industry trends, competitive landscape, and emerging technologies in data analytics to identify new business opportunities.
• Collaborate with the marketing team to create and implement marketing strategies around analytics to build pipeline. 
• Track and report on key performance indicators (KPIs) related to business development activities and revenue generation in the data analytics domain.
• Act as a liaison between the business and technical teams, ensuring effective communication and alignment of goals.
• First class influencing skills, able to quickly become a thought leader and trusted advisor.
• A customer-first mentality and focus, with a passion to improve our customer’s business through Pure’s unique technology and business value.
• Closely follow Analytics market trends, mapping customer challenges/needs with Pure Storage’s solutions strategy and roadmap while regularly updating the sales team. 
• Establish solution domain credibility with existing and prospective customers; providing the ability to cultivate relationships and envision creative sales and solution strategies that cross-sells the portfolio and generates additional revenue.
• Outstanding communication including written, diagrammatic, and oral and ability to reduce complex ideas to simple terms and express these to both a non-technical and technical audience
• Responsible for proactive engagement with account teams and helping to guide the teams to deliver the best solution in a dynamically evolving hyper-competitive environment leading to increased deal velocity and increased win rates.
• Become a trusted and collaborative conduit between sales, engineering, and solutions management
• Ignite excitement internally and externally around the company's long-term vision and ability to execute against the market trend while being the best choice for customers’ business.
• Present Pure’s solutions roadmap in a manner that inspires the prospects and customers to buy into Pure respecting the confidentiality and changeability of our plans.
• Help maintain the company solution focused culture to continue to retain and attract top technical talent
• Predict long-term competitive trends due to the constant shifts in the market
• Provide solutions focused leadership and mentoring for the SE organization
• Participate in strategic customer POC’s to ensure we meet and exceed customer requirements and guarantee the technical win.

 

Key Technical Skills
● 7+ years hands-on experience around Data Analytics
● Greenfield architectural design and roll-out of Analytics platforms in on-prem and/or Public Cloud environments
● Deep Splunk and/or Elasticsearch expertise
● Confluent and/or Apache Kafka and streaming analytics
● Deep Hadoop and Spark experience and its surrounding ecosystem
● Deep and hands-on experience in architecting, building, and operating big data systems
● Deep knowledge in SQL and at least one of the major programming languages in data analytics: Python, Java, Scala
● Linux administration and scripting (bash/python)
● Familiarity with server, network, storage, distributed file system, and object storage in the context of big data and data analytics
● Familiarity with database, software engineering and web development
● Contribution to open-source software in data analytics area is advantageous
● Knowledge and hands-on experience in machine learning and deep learning are advantageous
● Knowledge and hands-on experience in container and Kubernetes are advantageous
● Knowledge and hands-on experience in data warehouse are advantageous
● Knowledge and hands-on experience in Flink, and Cloudera CDP are advantageous

 

Qualifications and Requirements
● Solutions experience in one major and one or more minor solution domain. This should come from operational experience of running said solution in an end user context.
● Influencer in your solution community internally and externally to Pure.
● Strong technical prowess, including good working knowledge of storage, compute, database, networking, virtualization, and emerging technologies such as cloud native, AI/ML and/or Big Data Analytics where collaboration in the community and on social media is an advantage
● Ability to combine big-thinking strategic perspective with a detail-oriented approach to problem solving
● Entrepreneurial, ambitious approach coupled with a strong passion to make a difference
● Strong executive presence and ability to evangelize concepts to a wide range of personas and dispositions
● Ability to work collaboratively across the broader Pure Storage organization
● Proficient in driving for results, with a sense of accountability and ability to change pace and focus in dynamically evolving hyper-competitive environment
● Strong innovative disposition and outgoing personality
● English Language (Spoken and Written)

 

Requirements (Education, Certification, Training, and Experience)
● Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science or related field or equivalent experience.
● 10+ years of experience in senior technical sales expertise or 10+ years in solution domain operational or architect roles with some pre-sales experience.