Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer, Higher Education (Texas)

Overview

Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer supporting the Higher Education business, with a focus on R1 research universities, as technical lead on accounts.

What you'll do

• Develop a real understanding of what drives each institution: research priorities, funding cycles, capital versus operating constraints, and who actually makes the decision
• Connect technology, including the Everpure portfolio and the broader ecosystem, to measurable research and institutional outcomes
• Move fluently between principal investigators, research computing staff, central IT, CIOs, finance, and procurement, adapting the conversation to each audience instead of delivering the same presentation
• Build the business case alongside the technical one: total cost of ownership, power and cooling, data center footprint, staff time, and the real cost of the current environment
• Support research workloads end to end, from instrument and sequencer output through HPC and AI pipelines to long-term retention and archive
• Help customers work through data management questions: lifecycle and retention, reproducibility, sponsor and funding agency data sharing expectations, research data governance, and security requirements such as NIST 800-171 and CMMC where they apply
• Partner closely with account managers, specialists, channel partners, and higher education purchasing consortia and contract vehicles
• Take ownership of evaluations, benchmarks, proofs of concept, and system configurations, and secure the technical win
• Capture requirements and translate them into solutions that help institutions grow their research capability rather than just their capacity
• Author responses to RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs, which in this segment are frequent and detailed
• Stay current on the competitive landscape and make sure our positioning reflects it honestly
• Follow market and research computing trends closely enough to bring that thinking back into our organization
• Lead by example living the Pure Values: Persistence, Creativity, Teamwork, Ownership and Customer-first

What you'll need

• 8 or more years of relevant experience across technology, solution design, and customer-facing communication
• Pre-sales or customer-facing technical experience
• Experience with higher education, research computing, academic medical centers, or the public sector
• Familiarity with HPC and AI environments: parallel and distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, schedulers such as Slurm, and data pipelines for genomics, imaging, or simulation
• Broad technical depth across two or more of: cloud, HPC, AI and machine learning infrastructure, data management, core infrastructure, analytics, or financial and business applications. A career built entirely inside storage is not what we are looking for
• A track record of selling on value: uncovering what the customer is trying to accomplish and connecting technology to business, operational, and financial outcomes
• The ability to hold credible conversations with engineers, architects, executives, data scientists, researchers, finance teams, and procurement, and to adjust the message for each
• Comfort with ambiguity, and the judgment to challenge assumptions and help customers think through complicated decisions
• Curiosity, empathy, an open mind, and a genuine appetite for continuous learning
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• BS in CS, EE, another technical degree, or equivalent experience

Nice to have

• Knowledge of current and emerging storage architectures (FC, iSCSI, NAS, SAN, object) and file systems
• Linux, NFS, and distributed Linux environments
• VMware, Ethernet, TCP/IP, and general networking
• AWS, Azure, or GCP, and hybrid or cloud-native architectures
• Containers, Kubernetes, and microservices
• Data-intensive applications such as structured databases (SQL, Oracle) and analytics platforms
• Experience with grant-funded procurement, consortium purchasing, or public sector contract vehicles
• Experience with higher education, research computing, academic medical centers
• Familiarity with HPC, research and AI environments: parallel and distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, schedulers such as Slurm, and data pipelines for genomics, imaging, or simulation

Details

• Location: Texas; remote
• Salary range: $141,400 to $212,100 USD annual base salary; may be eligible for incentive pay and/or equity