GTM Client Executive

NetApp•San Jose, CA

About The Position

The DataPelago Account Executive owns the full enterprise sales cycle, from creating pipeline and winning new customers to closing paid contracts and expanding adoption across strategic accounts. This is a hands-on, quota-carrying hunter role focused on new business rather than traditional installed-base or account management. The role cultivates target accounts, identifies valuable workloads and business problems, engages technical champions and economic decision-makers, and builds urgency even when budgets or buying processes are not yet established. Working with Solution Architects and engineering, the Account Executive establishes proof-of-concept (PoC) engagements using representative customer applications and environments, with clear success criteria and commercial next steps. The AE owns customer alignment and commercial progress while technical teams lead execution. The role works with DataPelago and NetApp Account Executives to develop independently sourced and jointly identified opportunities, convert initial wins into broader adoption, and help build a repeatable enterprise sales motion. DataPelago is building a data-processing platform that applies accelerated computing to analytics and AI workloads by bringing high-performance compute closer to enterprise data. Following its acquisition by NetApp, DataPelago combines an early-stage company's ownership, pace, and influence with NetApp's global customer reach, resources, and enterprise relationships. The company continues to operate with a focused, startup-style model as it develops a scalable business and go-to-market motion. The role is located in San Jose, California.

Requirements

At least 8 years in a sales capacity.
Proven success in a quota-carrying enterprise sales role, personally prospecting, developing, and closing net-new complex technology deals.
Demonstrated ability to generate demand and pipeline without depending on an installed base or mature inbound lead engine.
Experience selling enterprise data, analytics, cloud infrastructure, AI, or other technically sophisticated products.
Understanding of enterprise workloads including ETL/ELT, data preparation, data transformation, large-scale analytics, and AI-related data pipelines.
Familiarity with data lakes, lakehouses, cloud storage, and major cloud infrastructure platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Experience driving customer PoCs with defined success criteria and representative workloads in partnership with technical teams, and converting results into commercial agreements.
Strong consultative selling, executive communication, account planning, value-selling, and cross-functional collaboration skills.
High integrity, customer trust, transparency, persistence, personal accountability, and consistent follow-through.
Comfort with ambiguity and building a zero-to-one sales motion.

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree preferred.
Experience with the Spark ecosystem or platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake.
Experience in startup and large-enterprise environments.

Responsibilities

Independently create and qualify a pipeline of net-new enterprise opportunities through targeted prospecting, account research, executive relationships, partners, and NetApp collaboration.
Cultivate strategic accounts and map technical champions, platform owners, influencers, economic buyers, and decision-makers across customer organizations.
Lead customer discovery to understand applications, data architectures, workloads, performance bottlenecks, infrastructure costs, and business priorities.
Build business cases connecting technical outcomes to measurable customer value and a credible path to purchase.
Structure PoCs with Solution Architects and customer teams, defining representative production-like workloads, success criteria, environment needs, milestones, stakeholders, and decision timelines.
Own customer engagement and momentum during PoCs, coordinating with Solution Architects and engineering to resolve issues, assess results, and align technical findings with commercial objectives.
Convert successful technical evaluations into paid contracts by leading pricing discussions, procurement, negotiations, and deal closure.
Drive land-and-expand growth by using initial wins, customer champions, and measurable outcomes to identify additional workloads, teams, and business units.
Partner with NetApp's sales organization to qualify jointly sourced leads, coordinate account engagement, and maintain clear opportunity ownership and communication.
Maintain accurate pipeline and account plans, disciplined follow-through, reliable forecasts, and accountability for individual sales quota.
Build trust through transparent communication, realistic commitments, and responsible representation of product capabilities and evaluation results.
Share customer needs, competitive insights, and field feedback with product, engineering, Product Marketing, and leadership; help develop repeatable sales plays and customer references.