Senior Sales Engineer

About the role

DDN powers the world's most demanding data workloads—from AI research to drug discovery, autonomous vehicles to financial modeling. For over two decades, our massively parallel storage solutions have enabled breakthrough innovations across industries. Join us in building the infrastructure that makes the impossible possible.

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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Requirements

• 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
• 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
• 3-8+ years in pre-sales, solutions architecture, or technical consulting
• Pro