Senior Director, Pre-Sales

About Us (Ensono)

Ensono is an expert technology adviser and managed service provider. As a relentless ally, we accelerate clients' digital transformation to achieve business outcomes that stand to last. Our dedicated team helps organizations optimize today's systems across any hybrid environment with services such as consulting, mainframe and application modernization, public cloud migration and cloud-native development. With certified experts in AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and recognized as Microsoft Datacenter Transformation Partner of the Year, Ensono has over 3500 associates globally and is headquartered in greater Chicago.

We care about your success, offering comprehensive strategic and managed services for mission-critical applications. Our Advisory and Consulting services can help upfront with an application strategy or find the right places for your applications – whether it's public, multi or hybrid cloud, or mainframe. And because we span across all mission-critical platforms, we can meet you wherever you are in your digital transformation journey, with 24/7 support when you need it. We are your relentless ally, flexing with you when challenges emerge so you don't feel stuck in place. With cross-platform certifications and decades of experience, our technology experts have become an extension of your team so you're continuously innovating – doing more with less while remaining secure. And that's just the beginning.

Position Summary

Ensono is looking for an experienced and motivated mainframe technical pre-sales leader to lead, coach, grow, and partner with technically skilled, customer-facing Solution Architects. You will help develop the industry's best solutions architects team by enabling and coaching them on best practices, solution selling, presentation, and speaking skills, as well as how to create and present value-driven architectures of widely varying size and complexity. In collaboration with sales, you will enable business outcomes across a broad set of customers. If you think you have what it takes to lead the best in the industry, Ensono is hiring.

This role is to lead the Pre-sales Solutions Architecture (SA) function in India. The India presales SA team comprises Individual Contributor SAs across Mainframe, Infrastructure, and Cloud business. The role is tasked with three primary responsibilities:

1) Recruit, hire, and develop pre-sales Solution Architect talent that addresses the needs of Ensono

2) Demonstrate technical thought leadership through direct customer/partner engagement at the most senior levels and delivering significant work that has strategic implications for the business

3) Help design, develop, and drive strategic and cross-functional initiatives to achieve business objectives

In this role, you will need to be technically capable and credible as well as effective in shaping the customer and solutions-focused skills of your team. You must enjoy learning and introducing new technology to help colleagues and customers embrace and adopt new technology. Furthermore, thought leadership of looking beyond the technology and considering the value technology creates for our customers, and helping to change how technology is viewed are important aspects of the role. You will help team members ramp up on Ensono as well as develop speaking, writing, presentation, and executive interaction skills.

What we are looking for:

• Well-versed in the mainframe hosting technology landscape with 15 years of overall experience in technology
• Enjoy developing technical talent to achieve great things. You will have a passion for educating, training, and enabling presales SA experts for a diverse and challenging set of Enterprise customers.
• Experienced communicator at all levels of our client environments from C-level to engineering
• Previous experience as an SA (Sales/Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect) with hosting service providers preferred
• Experienced with large Cloud, IaaS, Mainframe, and Datacenter outsourcing solutions
• Ability to create multi-platform, multi-year transformation roadmaps
• Has experience with (and preferably certified on) hyper-scale cloud platforms (AWS and Azure)
• Comfortable with executive-level positioning of complex solutions that span multiple disciplines (hosting, network, security, storage and backup, DR, etc.)
• Familiar with complex sales cycles and contracting process
• Experienced in planning and executing discovery and design workshops internally and at client sites
• Familiar with and can help create complicated financial (pricing) models to support technical solutions
• Have a strong understanding of solutions innovation. The ideal candidate will have experience working with customers or similar roles and leading architecture teams

Our focus on customer service and our experience in managing business complexity distinguishes us from our competitors. From current platforms to evolving technologies and everything in between, we deliver results for our clients by flawlessly executing infrastructure operations so our clients can focus on what they do best. We are looking for talented individuals who share this passion.

Key Areas of Focus for this Role

• Hire, on-board, train, and develop new pre-sales Solutions, Architects, from internal and external sources
• Coach Pre-sales Solutions Architects in the skills needed to conduct one-to-few and one-to-many training sessions
• Engage closely with C-level executives to lead enterprise-wide transformation programs
• Identify business drivers and goals and develop compelling board-ready proposals and value-driven business cases to achieve desired business outcomes
• Collaborate with cross-functional technology experts to drive plan and execute roadmaps to accelerate our customer's business outcome
• Support strategic client(s) as the Lead technical adviser for all initiatives
• Collaborate with counterparts in the Sales and Consulting organizations to create Pursuit, Solution, and Sales strategies for Enterprise clients
• Conduct discovery, assessment, and solution development workshops (often in collaboration with resources from consulting, operations, and product teams) to craft winning solutions
• Develop and document solutions that meet clients (technical and business) requirements and allow them to adapt to changing industry needs with a focus on transformation and re-platform efforts
• Conduct solution development sessions and present technical solutions and business cases to a wide variety of audience
• Gain executive buy-in for complex solutions by engaging in executive and senior-level technology discussions
• Work with finance and pricing teams to create complex multi-year financial models
• Gain clients' confidence as a trusted adviser by offering consultation and recommendations drawn from insights, technology know-how, and past experiences
• Align and partner with Product Management to help drive appropriate product enhancements and changes to the technology roadmap
• Aid in driving stability and innovation within the client's current and future state and create solutions based on client requirements and available product offerings
• Push for higher value/value-added services and solutions to the customer in line with Ensono's offerings

Requirements

• Strong mainframe pre-sales technical background with the ability to communicate and design at a master architect level
• Client-Facing / Pre-Sales Solutioning Experience
• Mainframe (Must have), Infrastructure, and Cloud Business Experience
• Experience setting up offshore teams and enabling workload movement
• Leadership experience in managing teams of presales solution architects
• Exceptional business acumen and high judgment – be able to use business and technology depth and breadth to understand customer needs and shape transformation initiative
• 7 years of relevant leadership experience in enterprise IT, consulting, and/or engineering/development
• Experience selling and delivering enterprise IT professional services or cloud services
• Highly credible with CxO and board-level audiences as well as technology leaders, engineers, and developers
• Experience in the technical documentation to capture solution components on time while ensuring an acceptable level of detail, data integrity, and accountability
• Exceptional interpersonal and communication (both written and verbal) skills. Experience communicating with both technical and non-technical stakeholders across multiple teams.
• Well-versed in the hosting technology landscape including compute, storage, backup, network, security, DR, DevOps, and IT governance

Key Attributes:

• Independent, Self-directed, Results-oriented
• Advanced presentation & communication skills
• Strong empathy, self-awareness, and interpersonal skills
• Able to challenge the status quo in a non-confrontational way
• Comfortable with low-level technical details as well as executive-level strategy work
• Analytical and Creative skills to structure and execute workshops to strategy roadmaps

Seniority Level:

• 15 years of experience as an architect or equivalent in the hosting and network space (preferably with a service provider and/or cloud MSP).

Shift Timings: 1:30 PM - 10:30 PM IST

Why Ensono?

Ensono is a place we unleash Associates to Do Great Things – for our clients and your career. This could mean achieving a professional goal, collaborating with your team on an innovative idea, learning a new skill, reaching a wellness milestone, or engaging in your community through volunteer programs. Whatever it means to you, we want Ensono to be the place where you can do great things.