X10K Presales Benelux

Description

The role is hybrid, with an average of 2 days per week in an HPE office.

The company is a global edge-to-cloud business that helps organisations connect, protect, analyse and act on data and applications, from edge to cloud.

This presales role focuses on unstructured data, AI and analytics. It is customer-facing and shapes solution design, customer adoption and product strategy.

The ideal candidate has strong storage fundamentals and understands how data moves through modern AI and analytics environments.

Job level TCP04, sales function.

Responsibilities

• Work with customers to design scalable file and S3 object storage for AI, analytics and enterprise workloads.
• Study application data flows, lifecycle needs and performance behaviour to recommend the right architecture.
• Size storage by capacity, throughput, latency, network bandwidth, growth, availability and workload needs.
• Lead technical workshops, assessments, benchmarks and hands-on proofs of concept (POCs).
• Act as the subject matter expert on S3 object storage, with solid working knowledge of NFS and SMB.
• Apply knowledge of AI inference, RAG, data lakes and analytics pipelines to storage design decisions.
• Work with product management and engineering to turn customer requirements into product and roadmap priorities.
• Bring competitive knowledge and market awareness into customer discussions and internal strategy.
• Travel as needed to support customers, partners and strategic opportunities.
• Document enterprise-scale file and object storage architectures.
• Analyse customer data flows, workloads, growth patterns and data management needs.
• Size environments for performance, capacity, resiliency and scalability.
• Plan and run hands-on POCs that validate performance, integration, scalability and operations.
• Design storage for AI inference, RAG, analytics and data lake workloads, covering throughput, latency, metadata, network design and data access.
• Explain how data is ingested, stored, processed, protected, moved, governed and consumed across modern pipelines.
• Turn field experience and customer requirements into product feedback and roadmap recommendations.
• Provide competitive analysis, technical positioning and solution guidance to sales and technical teams.
• Present architectures to both executive and deeply technical audiences.
• Support strategic presales work, including RFIs, RFPs, solution sizing and technical justification.

Requirements

• 7+ years designing, implementing or supporting enterprise storage and data architectures.
• A bachelor's degree in computer science, information technology, engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong customer-facing experience in architecture, consulting or presales.
• Strong grounding in S3 object storage, including buckets, objects, APIs, authentication, data protection and common application integration patterns.
• Working knowledge of 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 AI and analytics data pipelines, including inference, RAG, vector databases, data lakes, Lakehouse architectures and large-scale analytics.
• Ability to place storage within the wider data flow, lifecycle, management, protection, governance and application consumption.
• Solid understanding of throughput, latency, IOPS, metadata performance, concurrency and network bandwidth.
• Excellent communication, presentation, troubleshooting and problem-solving skills.
• Willingness and ability to travel for customer engagements.
• Experience with several of the following is a strong plus: 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 characterisation and workload benchmarking.
• Experience with one or more enterprise file or object storage platforms is preferred, 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 landscape; experience in technical presales, consulting, solution architecture or customer advisory roles.

Conditions

Hybrid working, with an average of 2 days per week in an HPE office.

Travel as needed for customers, partners and strategic opportunities.

HPE is an equal opportunity employer and makes decisions on qualifications, merit and business need.

Benefits

• Health and wellbeing benefits covering physical, financial and emotional wellbeing.
• Personal and professional development programmes, including routes to becoming a knowledge expert or moving into another division.
• Flexibility to manage work and personal needs.