Presales Storage Architect – Unstructured Data (f/m/d)

Description

The role is hybrid, with an expectation of about 2 days per week in an office of the company.

The company works across edge-to-cloud data and applications, helping customers connect, protect, analyze and act on their data. The team is Data Solutions, based in Switzerland, serving some of the country's larger organizations on modernizing, protecting and getting more value from their data.

This is a customer-facing architecture role with strong influence on solution design, customer adoption and product direction. You will help customers design, size, validate and tune storage for AI inference, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), analytics, data lakes and other data-heavy workloads, with a focus on unstructured data and modern file and S3 object storage.

The ideal candidate knows storage fundamentals well and understands how data moves through AI and analytics environments.

Responsibilities

• Design and document file and object storage solutions at enterprise scale.
• Examine customer data flows, workloads, growth and data management needs.
• Size storage for performance, capacity, resilience and scalability.
• Lead and carry out hands-on proofs of concept that check performance, integration, scalability and operations.
• Design storage for AI inference, RAG, analytics and data lake workloads, covering throughput, latency, metadata, network layout and data access.
• Explain how data is ingested, stored, processed, protected, moved, governed and consumed across modern data pipelines.
• Turn customer needs and field experience into product feedback and roadmap input.
• Provide competitive analysis, technical positioning and solution guidance to sales and technical colleagues.
• Present architectures and recommendations to both executive and deeply technical audiences.
• Support strategic presales work, including RFIs and RFPs, solution sizing and technical justification.
• Lead technical workshops, assessments and benchmarks.
• Work with product management and engineering to convert customer requirements into product and roadmap priorities.
• Travel to support customers, partners and strategic opportunities.

Requirements

• 7+ years designing, implementing or supporting enterprise storage and data architectures.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong background in customer-facing architecture, consulting or presales.
• Solid knowledge of S3 object storage, including buckets, objects, APIs, authentication, data protection and common application integration patterns.
• Working knowledge of enterprise file protocols, especially NFS and SMB.
• Experience sizing storage by capacity, performance, growth, network and application needs.
• Proven ability to plan, configure, run and troubleshoot technical POCs.
• Understanding of modern AI and analytics pipelines, including AI inference, RAG, vector databases, data lakes and Lakehouses, and large-scale analytics.
• Ability to place storage within the wider context of data flow, lifecycle, management, protection, governance and application use.
• Strong grasp of storage performance concepts: throughput, latency, IOPS, metadata performance, concurrency and network bandwidth.
• Excellent communication, presentation, troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
• Willingness and ability to travel for customer work.
• Preferred, with several of the following: experience with AI inference and RAG architectures; vector databases, embeddings and retrieval workflows; data lakes and Lakehouse architectures; analytics platforms and distributed query engines; GPU-based infrastructure and AI data pipelines; high-throughput ingestion and processing; S3-based application architectures; data movement between compute, storage, cloud and AI platforms; performance characterization and workload benchmarking.
• Preferred: experience with one or more enterprise file or object storage platforms, such as Dell PowerScale or ObjectScale, Pure Storage FlashBlade, NetApp ONTAP or StorageGRID, VAST Data, Scality, or other enterprise file or S3-compatible object platforms.
• Strong pluses: familiarity with AWS, Azure and GCP storage services and integration patterns; understanding of hybrid and multi-cloud data architectures; knowledge of modern AI and analytics platforms and their storage needs; strong awareness of the competitive file and object storage market; experience in technical presales, consulting, solution architecture or customer advisory.

Conditions

Hybrid role, with about 2 days per week required in a company office.

Based in Switzerland.

The company is an equal opportunity employer and decides on qualifications, merit and business need.

The company complies with laws on the use of arrest and conviction records in hiring.

Benefits

• Health and wellbeing benefits covering physical, financial and emotional wellbeing.
• Career development programs, including paths to become a subject expert or move into another division.
• Flexibility to manage work and personal commitments.