Consulting Systems Engineer

Job Summary:

As a Data Protection Consulting Systems Engineer (CSE) you will utilize your strong technical competencies and customer service orientation to provide the highest level of technical consultation to sales teams to support sales goals. You will work on cross-functional teams including Sales, Product Marketing, Services and Engineering to create a strategy that provides the best solutions to customers. You will become intimately acquainted with the customer's business requirements, technical needs, systems, environment and service history, enabling you to present targeted business solutions.

Essential Functions:

Consulting Systems Engineers work with NetApp potential customers and Account/Sales Teams by providing expertise in the following areas:

- Work closely with sales as a consultant to understand prospect's technical needs related to data protection technologies/solutions.
- Perform consultative selling of optimum support and system solutions.
- Manage and evolve a comprehensive technology collaboration and support.
- Provide technical consultation/education to the Sales team and keep them apprised on new product information.
- Participate in customer evaluations and proof of concepts for deploying test systems.
- Keep apprised of all new product features and capabilities, both with NetApp's portfolio, as well as technology partners
- Evangelize NetApp, our products and our solutions both externally with customers and partners and internally with sales and engineering teams.Job RequirementsRequirements:

- Experience with SAN, NAS, or DAS storage infrastructures required and specific experience with NetApp products a plus
- Experience in managing enterprise backup environments (direct expertise in one or more of the following required:
CommVault Simpana, Symantec NetBackup, Tivoli Storage Manager)
- Experience in architecting/managing and enterprise DR/COOP strategy including but not limited to:
application clustering technologies, array replication technologies, hypervisor clustering technologies
- Strong working knowledge of file systems and storage technologies (NAS, SAN), IP networking, and/or Fibre Channel networking is required.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Good interpersonal communication and customer service skills are needed in order to work successfully with prospects, customers, and cross functional teams to meet sales goals.
- Account management and project management experience is preferred.
- Strong aptitude for learning new technologies and understanding how to utilize them in a customer facing environment.
- Ability to follow standard engineering principles and practices.
- Creative approach to problem solving.
- Travel to the prospective customer's domestic sites and other global sites as necessary.
Responsibility and Interaction:

- Responsibility:

o As a seasoned professional with a wide range of experiences in virtualization technologies (data center, server and desktop), this individual uses professional concepts and company objectives to resolve complex issues in creative and effective ways.
o Is responsible for support of large, complex, high visibility, or strategically important accounts.

- Interaction:

o This individual effectively works with, and influences senior internal personnel within the function, employees in other functions that support the sales effort, and has direct customer contact.
o Limited management supervision and direction is provided since this individual operates and drives results independently.
o The ideal candidate is a subject matter expert and strongly influences sales team decisions and initiatives. May also act as a team leader and major decision maker for team projects.Education and ExperienceEducation & Experience:

- Well versed in key customer business challenges, specific experience in Federal, SLED, Higher Education, or HealthCare is highly desirable.
- Strong technical and project management skills and must be able to work cross-functionally with other development teams and partner organizations.
- Excellent business acumen with a strong ability to map business requirements to technical solutions
- Experience developing and implementing virtualizations solutions deployed in enterprise environments

- 8 to 12 years of experience is preferred.
- A Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering; or related field is required; a Graduate Degree is preferred.
- Experience which demonstrates a significant level of expertise in technical specifications required to sell NetApp products and services is required.
- Specialized knowledge in server and desktop virtualization technologies.
- Prior experience as a Technical Support Engineer, Escalations Engineer, Technical Account Manager, and/or a Project Manager is desired.