Senior Sales Engineer
DDN•Santa Clara, CA
•$250,000 - $300,000
About The Position
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.
Requirements
- Strong understanding of storage and data architectures: SAN, NAS, object storage, parallel file systems
- Knowledge of 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
- Curiosity about massively parallel technologies (Lustre, GPFS, Exascaler)
- Aptitude for AI workloads and how storage enables AI innovation
- Ability to communicate technical concepts to both engineers and executives
- Bachelor's in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience)
- Exposure to storage/systems through coursework, internships, or projects
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
- Customer-facing communication skills
- 3-8+ years in pre-sales, solutions architecture, or technical consulting
- Proven track record designing storage/infrastructure solutions
- Hands-on experience with enterprise storage systems
- Success managing complex technical sales cycles
Nice To Haves
- Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, HPC, or high-performance workloads
- 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
- Whether you're coming from enterprise storage vendors (Weka, VAST, NetApp, Pure), research computing (university HPC, national labs), or infrastructure roles (cloud architects, platform engineers), your experience translates to this role. Technical depth + customer focus matter more than your starting point.
Responsibilities
- 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
- 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
- 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
Benefits
- Competitive compensation: base, bonuses, stock options, benefits
- Flexible work arrangements
- Clear career progression: SE → Senior SE → Principal Architect
- Continuous learning: training, certifications, conferences
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
