Senior Sales Engineer
Primary stack
Nice to have's
Job description
About the Position
Senior Sales Engineer
Santa Clara Office
About DDN
DDN powers the world's most demanding data workloads-from AI research to drug discovery, autonomous vehicles to financial modeling. For over two decades, our massively parallel storage solutions have enabled breakthrough innovations across industries. Join us in building the infrastructure that makes the impossible possible.
The Role
As a Sales Engineer, you'll architect high-performance storage solutions that enable customers to achieve their boldest ambitions. Work across finance, pharmaceuticals, education, and physical AI-designing systems that power real-time trading, accelerate drug discovery, enable groundbreaking research, and fuel autonomous systems.
You'll translate complex customer requirements into elegant technical solutions, demonstrate capabilities through POCs and benchmarks, and serve as a trusted advisor throughout the sales cycle.
Responsibilities
Customer Engagement
- Partner with customers to understand their critical data challenges-high-frequency trading, genomics processing, AI model training, or autonomous vehicle sensor fusion
- Translate technical requirements into elegant, scalable storage solutions that exceed expectations
- Act as trusted technical advisor throughout the sales cycle
Solution Design
- Architect storage for AI/ML training, HPC simulations, data analytics, and GPU-accelerated workloads
- Design for reliability, resilience, security, and scale-balancing performance with data protection
- Create BOMs, system architectures, and technical proposals for complex RFPs
- Conduct live demos, POCs, and performance benchmarking
- Integrate with GPU clusters, Kubernetes, cloud platforms, and AI frameworks
Innovation & Growth
- Stay current on AI infrastructure and storage technology trends
- Collaborate with Product and Engineering teams using field insights
- Mentor team members and contribute to technical thought leadership
- Shape product direction based on customer needs
Requirements
Technical Foundation (All Levels)
- Experience with parallel technologies (Lustre, GPFS, Exascaler)
- Strong understanding of storage and data architectures: SAN, NAS, object storage, parallel file systems
- Knowledge of storage architectural patterns for reliability, resilience, security, and scale
- Understanding of storage and data protocols: S3, POSIX, NFS, SMB
- Familiarity with network protocols: TCP/IP, InfiniBand, RDMA
- Aptitude for AI workloads and how storage enables AI innovation
- Ability to communicate technical concepts to both engineers and executives
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- Customer-facing communication skills
Experienced (8+ years)
- 8+ years in pre-sales, solutions architecture, or technical consulting
- Proven track record designing storage/infrastructure solutions
- Hands-on experience with enterprise storage systems
- Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, HPC, or high-performance workloads (preferred)
- Success managing complex technical sales cycles
Nice to Have
- Genuine curiosity about AI and its impact across industries
- Ownership mindset-you solve problems until they're solved
- Ability to translate technical complexity into business value
- Thrive in fast-evolving technology environments
- Collaborative team player with integrity and empathy
We Offer
Impact
- Power cancer research, autonomous vehicles, and AI breakthroughs
- Work on infrastructure enabling discoveries that change the world
- See direct results from your designs
Growth
- Master AI infrastructure, parallel computing, and next-gen storage
- Learn from world-class engineers and architects
- Clear career progression: SE → Senior SE → Principal Architect
- Continuous learning: training, certifications, conferences
Team & Culture
- 20+ years leading storage innovation
- Technical excellence and customer obsession
- Competitive compensation: base, bonuses, stock options, benefits
- Flexible work arrangements
About the Company
Whether you're coming from enterprise storage vendors, research computing, or infrastructure roles (cloud architects, storage Administrator, platform engineers), your experience translates to this role. Technical depth + customer focus matter more than your starting point.
© Data Direct Networks. This job description was sourced from the employer's public career page. TheJob is not the employer — we index the posting and route candidates to the source. All content rights and hiring decisions belong to the employer.
DataDirect Networks (DDN.com) is a world leader in massively-scalable storage platforms and solutions engineered for the Big Data and Cloud era. Our storage, processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high-data growth environments to achieve the highest levels of systems performance, scalability and efficiency.In solving today’s Big Data lifecycle management challenges at scale, DDN enables organizations to maximize the value of their information, everywhere. As the technology behind the world’s leading data-driven organizations, our customers include online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, financial services, media production houses and security and intelligence agencies.
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