Strategic Account Manager – AI Infrastructure Sales
About The Position
This role is central to Western Digital’s AI Infrastructure growth strategy, focused on driving datacenter storage adoption across a defined set of strategic platform and infrastructure customers. The Strategic Account Manager is a quota-carrying seller responsible for owning account strategy, expanding multi-year platform opportunities, and converting architectural alignment into repeatable revenue. This role requires the ability to operate at the intersection of infrastructure platforms, software-defined storage, and data lifecycle architectures while navigating complex buying centers. This role will focus on strategic software-defined storage, data protection, hybrid cloud, HCI, scale-out platform providers, and infrastructure software companies. The role is expected to understand each customer’s architecture, roadmap, appliance or platform strategy, and long-term capacity growth model, then align WD technologies to their product, qualification, and go-to-market priorities.
Requirements
- 8–12+ years in datacenter, cloud, or infrastructure sales
- Experience selling into platform providers and infrastructure vendors
- Experience selling to or partnering with data protection, HCI, hybrid cloud, scale-out file, or software-defined storage platform companies
- Proven success managing complex sales cycles
- Background selling solution-based offerings
- Experience introducing new infrastructure technologies into strategic accounts, including technical positioning, customer qualification, and adoption planning
- Architecture-led solution selling
- Strategic account planning
- Understanding of backup, recovery, cyber resilience, HCI, scale-out file, hybrid cloud, and software-defined storage architectures
- Executive engagement and communication
- Cross-functional influence
- Complex deal execution
- Business and financial acumen
- New technology introduction and customer adoption planning
- Pipeline and forecast discipline
Responsibilities
- Develop and execute multi-year account plans aligned to platform refresh cycles, customer buying centers, and long-term revenue growth
- Maintain a high-confidence pipeline, drive forecast accuracy, and manage execution cadence across strategic opportunities
- Position WD storage within software-defined and AI data architectures by translating workload requirements into infrastructure, scalability, and cost value
- Engage customer engineering and product teams to drive design-in, validation, platform standardization, and future roadmap influence
- Build senior stakeholder relationships and communicate WD’s value tied to scalability, cost, and long-term platform advantage
- Own large, multi-stakeholder opportunities and lead negotiation through close across global organizations
- Develop account strategies tailored to software-defined storage, data protection, HCI, hybrid cloud, and scale-out file platform providers
- Identify where WD technologies improve platform economics, density, performance-per-watt, retention cost, and long-term capacity scaling
- Build relationships across product management, hardware engineering, qualification, supply chain, procurement, alliances, and executive stakeholders
- Drive WD technology qualification into customer appliances, reference architectures, validated solutions, and future platform releases
- Convert roadmap alignment into design wins, repeatable platform revenue, and long-term supply commitments
- Introduce and position new WD datacenter technologies, including UltraSMR, high-capacity HDD platforms, advanced firmware capabilities, and emerging storage innovations
- Identify customer workloads and architectures where new technologies deliver measurable cost, density, power, and scalability advantages
- Drive early technical engagement with customer architecture, engineering, qualification, and product teams
- Coordinate internal alignment across sales, product, engineering, marketing, and supply chain to support customer adoption
- Build customer-specific adoption plans from technical education to proof of concept, qualification, platform integration, and volume deployment
- Translate customer feedback into roadmap input for future WD products and platform requirements
Benefits
- paid vacation time
- paid sick leave
- medical/dental/vision insurance
- life, accident and disability insurance
- tax-advantaged flexible spending and health savings accounts
- employee assistance program
- other voluntary benefit programs such as supplemental life and AD&D, legal plan, pet insurance, critical illness, accident and hospital indemnity
- tuition reimbursement
- transit
- the Applause Program
- employee stock purchase plan
- the WD Savings 401(k) Plan
- bonuses under either WD’s Short Term Incentive Plan (“STI Plan”) or the Sales Incentive Plan (“SIP”)
- annual Long-Term Incentive (LTI) program, which consists of restricted stock units (RSUs) or cash equivalents
- RSU awards are also available to eligible new hires
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
