Field Architect

Overview

Senior customer-facing technical leadership role defining, validating, and guiding AIStor architectures for AI, analytics, cloud-native applications, and large-scale data infrastructure, acting as trusted technical advisor to customers, partners, and internal teams.

What you'll do

• Lead technical discovery with customers and partners to understand business goals, application requirements, data architecture, infrastructure constraints, and success criteria.
• Define scalable AIStor architectures that map directly to those requirements.
• Define and validate AIStor architectures for AI/ML training and inference, analytics platforms, data lakehouse environments, high-performance data pipelines, large object workloads, and modern application data services.
• Serve as a subject matter expert in object storage, S3-compatible architectures, distributed systems, metadata, replication, erasure coding, security, performance tuning, and large-scale namespace design.
• Build trusted relationships with customer technical stakeholders, including infrastructure, platform, analytics, AI, security, application, and operations teams.
• Guide customers toward informed architecture decisions and proactively identify opportunities to improve performance, resilience, scale, and operational efficiency.
• Lead technical evaluations, system configurations, performance testing, interoperability validation, and proof-of-value engagements in real customer environments.
• Partner with Customer Engineering, Product Management, and Engineering teams to help customers move from evaluation to production and from initial deployment to broader adoption.
• Provide technical leadership on Kubernetes, containers, automation, and cloud-native deployment patterns, including hybrid cloud, private cloud, public cloud, and edge infrastructure models.
• Work with technology partners, reseller partners, and customer teams to support complete solutions involving analytics engines, AI platforms, Kubernetes distributions, data protection tools, identity systems, observability platforms, and public cloud services.
• Build and deliver architecture presentations, whiteboard sessions, demonstrations, best practices, workshops, and technical enablement sessions for customers, partners, and internal teams.
• Contribute to or lead technical portions of RFPs, RFIs, RFQs, security reviews, architecture questionnaires, and competitive evaluations.
• Advocate for customer requirements internally by capturing field feedback, competitive insights, workload patterns, integration needs, and enhancement opportunities.
• Work with Product and Engineering teams to help inform roadmap priorities and improve customer outcomes.
• Stay current on object storage, data lakehouse, AI infrastructure, analytics, Kubernetes, cloud, and competitive storage trends.

What you'll need

• Strong background in enterprise storage, object storage, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, data platforms, or high-performance data-intensive applications.
• Strong understanding of object storage concepts and S3-compatible architectures.
• 10+ years of experience in a senior customer-facing technical role such as Field Architect, Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, Systems Engineer, or Technical Consultant.
• Hands-on experience with Linux, networking, storage systems, virtualization, containers, Kubernetes, and modern data center infrastructure.
• Experience designing or supporting AI, machine learning, analytics, data lakehouse, or large-scale data pipeline environments.
• Ability to conduct technical discovery, design architectures, build demonstrations, guide proof-of-value execution, analyze performance, and communicate tradeoffs clearly.
• Comfortable working with heterogeneous enterprise environments involving compute, storage, networking, security, identity, observability, backup, disaster recovery, and application teams.
• Strong verbal, written, whiteboarding, and presentation skills, with the ability to communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and executive audiences.
• Ability to work collaboratively across customers, partners, Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Engineering teams.
• Strong customer-success orientation, intellectual curiosity, sense of ownership, and ability to prioritize effectively in a fast-moving environment.
• Willingness to travel as needed to support customers, partners, field events, and internal team activities.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field; equivalent practical experience will also be considered.

Nice to have

• Experience with HTTP, REST APIs, JSON, security models, replication, data protection, and scale-out system design.
• Familiarity with ecosystem technologies such as Databricks, Starburst, Spark, Trino, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Kafka, PyTorch, TensorFlow, or other AI and analytics frameworks.
• Experience with public cloud and hybrid cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, or private cloud platforms.

Details

• Remote - Bay Area location.
• Salary range $200,000 - $225,000 base with commission.