23 hours ago
London, United KingdomStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the vision, strategy, and execution of DDN’s EMEA Sales Engineering function across multiple sub-regions and market segments.
- Lead organizational transformation, cultural change, accountability, and operating-model development across a distributed, multilayered technical organization.
- Attract, retain, coach, develop, and promote Sales Engineering talent, including establishing onboarding, enablement, and career-development programs.
- Design and implement KPI frameworks, dashboards, reporting mechanisms, and operating cadences covering technical win rates, POC conversion, deal-cycle contribution, customer satisfaction, and productivity.
- Partner with Sales leadership on pipeline strategy, deal qualification, forecast accuracy, and SE resource allocation.
- Serve as the executive bridge to Product Management, Engineering, Marketing, Professional Services, and Support, translating customer intelligence into roadmap input.
- Ensure consistent technical execution from discovery through POC, architecture review, technical close, deployment, and expansion.
- Establish architectural standards, technical messaging, solution-positioning frameworks, and consistent technical deliverables across the SE organization.
- Represent DDN Sales Engineering in executive customer briefings, strategic partner events, and industry forums.
- Serve as an executive technical sponsor for strategic accounts and high-stakes competitive situations.
Requirements
- 15+ years of experience in Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, or Systems Engineering.
- At least 7 years of senior people leadership experience managing managers.
- Demonstrated ability to lead and transform a distributed, multilayered technical organization at regional or global scale.
- Proven experience designing KPI frameworks and operational metrics that improve Sales Engineering performance.
- Demonstrated success attracting, retaining, and developing exceptional technical talent through career development and culture building.
- Experience leading significant cultural or structural transformation with tangible, sustainable results.
- Strong executive communication and cross-functional influence skills.
- Deep background in enterprise storage, data infrastructure, AI/ML infrastructure, HPC, or distributed systems.
- Experience driving accountability without micromanagement and building collaborative, team-oriented cultures.
- Preferred experience leading Sales Engineering organizations at the VP or equivalent level within technology companies with $200M+ revenue.
- Preferred familiarity with NeoCloud providers, AI training infrastructure, HPC, financial services, life sciences, or federal/government markets.
- Preferred familiarity with GPU clusters, parallel file systems, object storage, and MLOps pipelines.
- Preferred experience scaling Sales Engineering teams and operating models in high-growth technology environments.
- Preferred experience establishing Sales Engineering Center of Excellence practices, including demo environments, reference architectures, reusable technical assets, and enablement curricula.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience; MBA or advanced degree is a plus.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation package including base salary, variable incentive, equity, and comprehensive benefits.
- Opportunity to shape the technical go-to-market strategy of a global AI data storage leader.
- Executive support to build and transform the EMEA Sales Engineering organization.
- Partnership with senior Sales, Product, and Engineering leaders on technically demanding and commercially significant deals.
Categories
Solutions Engineering
About DDN
DDN builds high-performance data storage and data management systems for AI, machine learning, and high-performance computing workloads used by enterprises, research institutions, and governments. It sells appliance hardware and software (including parallel file systems and AI data platforms) along with support and professional services. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Chatsworth, California, the privately held company reports serving over 11,000 organizations worldwide.