Senior Solution Architect

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SUSE puts the "open" back in open source, collaborating with partners and communities to give customers the agility to tackle innovation challenges today and the freedom to evolve their strategy and solutions tomorrow. For more information, visit

Senior Solution Architect

Job Description
Position Purpose
The Senior Solution Architect's role is to fully understand a prospect's business and technical scenario and develop and communicate a solution to that scenario leveraging SUSE products and services. The Senior Solution Architect exhibits a high level of sales and business maturity, operates independently in pre-sales and customer technical relationship activities, and has the proven ability to thoroughly understand business problems – including the bigger picture of the customer's goals and strategies - and recommend the appropriate SUSE technology and service offerings and differentiators.

A Senior Solution Architect interacts with prospective customers through executive meetings, discovery conversations, solution demonstrations, executive-level presentations, and follow-up discussions. The primary role of the Senior Solution Architect during an active sales engagement is to lead the development of technical trust within the customer that the proposed SUSE solution will address the customer's problem and is the best choice over any competitive offering. During this process, the Senior Solution Architect will engage other experts and specialists within SUSE and partners in collaboration to create a complete and supportable technical solution.

In addition to deal support, the Senior Solution Architect collaborates with sales account executives and partner executives to establish and develop ongoing technical trust within customers and partner organizations, and provides subject-matter expertise for marketing activities and events. As a senior member of the SUSE Solution Architecture team, this role requires a high level of autonomy and self-direction, and may also include coordination and mentoring of more junior team members.

Objectives

• Prospect Qualification: The Senior Solution Architect aids in qualifying prospects to assure they are well-aligned with SUSE's go-to market product and solution capabilities.
• Pre-Sales Lifecycle Management: The Senior Solution Architect provides high quality, business-oriented and technical support to the sales team to assure the product-oriented aspects of the sales campaign are strongly aligned with the business objectives of the prospect throughout the sales cycle.
• Account Management: The Senior Solution Architect is responsible for the technical relationship with key accounts and should understand the business context and goals of customers in order to predict and identify ongoing opportunities and guide business users.

Essential Job Functions
Prospect and Customer Facing

• Own and progress opportunities through the qualification, definition, proof/evaluation, proposal and closure stages of the sales cycle with attention to timelines.
• Respond to the functional and business requirements and capabilities sections of RFI/RFPs
• Collaborate with the sales representative and prospect to ensure that the prospect's business needs can be addressed with SUSE's current and roadmap product and service capabilities.
• Listen, understand, and analyze the prospect's business requirements and compose, validate, and present the best possible SUSE solution.
• Consult with and lead other SUSE experts – including product management, development, and technical specialists – in the development of the best solution to meet the customer's business needs and SUSE commercial goals.
• Prepare and deliver value-based "fit to standard" demonstrations & presentations in support of sales cycles. Preparation may include customization of standard materials in order to ensure the delivery of an appealing and compelling presentation specific to each customer.
• Lead teams of solution architects in the implementation of proof-of-value and customer demos. Ensure that any demonstration meets the prospect's key pain points and requirements, highlighting and differentiating SUSE's capabilities.
• Prospect and Customer Technical/Solution Liaison
• Establish and maintain trust relationships with customers and prospects and understand their wider organizational context and objectives. Solicit and provide product feedback from customers and prospects.
• Identify new opportunities within new and existing customer accounts where SUSE solutions or products can be used.

Internal Facing

• Advise internal senior management on the technical and business strategy within active deals.
• Maintain technical information records within opportunity tracking systems.
• Maintain alignment with Marketing and Product Management of existing and future SUSE capabilities and help drive product innovation.
• Keep up to date with any new SUSE solutions across the business lines. Understand functionality and interoperability of SUSE components.
• Collect and communicate competitive intelligence from the field
• Be a Go-To Person on competitive information for Products, Process, Industry and Verticals
• Exchange best practices and share knowledge within the Solution Architecture community
• Mentor more junior Solution Architect team members in becoming more effective in customer engagement, including handling objections and customer challenges
• Work with product management & development teams to influence the incorporation of key capabilities that increase the competitiveness of SUSE's product offering.

Requirements
Customer-Oriented Skills

• Experience engaging with senior leaders (up to CxO level) on various solutions and business problems. Able to listen to and analyze a prospect's requirements, understand and incorporate the customer's context and aspirations, and to present to solutions with a compelling technical and business value
• Demonstrated ability to translate business problems into technical requirements, and technical solutions into business value.
• Provide pre-sales support to large & well-qualified deals
• Ability to review and customize Proof-of-Value documents involving SUSE technologies & services.
• Able to work independently and manage and appropriately prioritize multiple simultaneous customer opportunities
• Ability to provide guidance and consult with customers at multiple levels of an organization.

Business and Leadership Skills

• Demonstrate a team attitude and leadership
• Ability to act as a mentor due to outstanding character, judgment and knowledge
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Proven ability to manage time and deliver on deadlines
• Experience developing and presenting clear and concise product briefings
• Proven ability to unearth business requirements & drivers
• Proven ability to map business drivers & initiatives to technology offering & differentiators
• Able to lead teams of solution architects delivering on Proofs-of-Value and customized demonstrations.
• Ability to lead discovery meetings to identify business value and ROI for complex business challenges

Technology and Consultative Skills

• Strong understanding of SUSE's products including internal architecture, with an ability to leverage these in the sales cycle.
• Strong experiences with implementation of SUSE technologies in customer projects or Proofs-of-Value.
• Expert in providing best practices to customers and helping with IT Strategy and implementation planning related to SUSE solutions domain
• Have strong technical understanding and speaking knowledge about SUSE's products and capabilities

Education and Experience

• 5+ years prior experience in a customer-facing pre-sales / solution architect role
• In depth as well as hands-on experience and knowledge on Kubernetes, Kubernetes Security, Artificial Intelligence, Linux, High Availability, Virtualization technology such as KVM, Kubevirt
• Understanding and experience of CI/CD, DevOps, scripting
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, mathematics, engineering or similar STEM qualification and/or work experience
• Understanding of business infrastructure technology
• Experience with open source software development concepts
• Experience with Business Infrastructure concepts

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