Advisory Sales Engineer - Strategic AI
Overview
Job Description 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.
What You'll Do
Customer Engagement
- 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
Solution Design
- 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
Innovation & Growth
- 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
What You Bring Technical Foundation (All Levels)
- 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
Entry Level (0-3 years)
- 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
Experienced (3+ years)
- 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
- Experience with AI/ML infrastructure, HPC, or high-performance workloads (preferred)
- Success managing complex technical sales cycles
What Sets You Apart
- 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
DDN DDN has a very strong orientation towards these 4 characteristics and any successful employee will demonstrate these capabilities: Self-Starter - Takes independent action to identify and solve problems. Seeks out relevant information needed to make decisions. Gets involved with new initiatives. Success/Achievement Orientation - Delivers quality results consistently. Targets, achieves (or exceeds) measurable results. Sets challenging goals, focuses on critical priorities, and is accountable. Problem Solving - Recognizes problems and responds with a systematic assessment that identifies and addresses cause of issue. Practical, realistic, and resourceful. Innovative - Builds and improves key business processes that enhance the effectiveness of DDN. Generates new ideas, challenges the status quo, and solves problems creatively. #LI-Remote