Principal Cloud Solutions Engineer

Key Responsibilities and Essential Job Functions:

• Serve as a technical mentor, coach, and escalation point for Field SEs across regions. 

• Lead qualified sales calls and customer meetings (travel may be required) to architect Cloud, Managed Services, and or Colocation (Hybrid) solutions for new logo or existing customers.  

• Lead cross-functional technical strategy sessions to standardize solution approaches and improve team performance. 

• Create, review, and validate complex CMS/Hybrid/Colocation designs to ensure accuracy, feasibility, and alignment with customer business outcomes. 

• Collaborate with internal product teams to influence roadmap, validate, and improve new offerings introduced to the market. 

• Work closely with the Marketing team to strengthen our content and messaging strategies. 

• Self-motivated and capable of independently driving customer outcomes and strategies.  

• Drive continuous improvement by developing reusable artifacts, methodologies, and best practices for the SE organization. 

• Support strategic partnerships, author blogs and whitepapers, and present on panels. 

• Guide customers through consultative conversations that align technical requirements with business drivers and long-term outcomes. 

• Support sales teams nationally, with a regional affinity, by providing technical drawings and designs of CMS Solutions along with narratives that support the business impact of our recommendations. 

• Keep current on all product offerings and industry trends and technologies.

• Create complete and accurate documentation to deliver to Implementation upon successful closing of an opportunity. 

• Create a complete, complex CMS/Hybrid solution design and formally present solutions to potential customers. 

• Possess the ability to ask open-ended questions to potential customers to uncover critical business drivers and discover required data to formulate solutions. 

• After information gathering and assessment, create quote(s) and present solutions to potential clients based on Flexential's benefits and capabilities. 

• Lead regional and national datacenter tours and tailored technical demonstrations. 

• Perform other duties as required and assigned.

• Ensure high-quality handoff to Implementation teams with detailed design materials and knowledge transfer. 

Required Qualifications:

• A bachelor’s degree or higher in an Engineering or IT-related industry or equivalent preferred.

• A minimum of 10-15+ years of experience in industry-relevant sales, consulting, and/or sales engineering. 

• A demonstrated ability to design & explain solutions to both business and technical audiences. 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Documented success as a senior or principal technical contributor within a managed IT service, Network Services Provider, and or cloud solutions environment. 

• Must have expert-level understanding of multi-tier cloud or hybrid application architectures, virtualization technologies, data center infrastructure, and end-to-end solutioning. 

• Proven technical engineer able to make recommendations towards architecture changes when appropriate. 

• Must have expert knowledge of Networking, Firewalls, Load Balancers, and Switches. 

• Accomplished presales engineer able to drive win rates in strategic accounts. 

• Must be able to identify, recommend, and implement solution standardization ideas that improve deal velocity and reduce risk. 

• Must be technical, team-oriented, and have a documented path of success and contribution to a growing business in the managed IT services field.  

• Must have the ability to grasp complex technical issues and clearly and simply translate them into non-technical solutions that address and solve the underlying business needs.

• Must be detail-oriented, organized, driven, and have excellent communication and presentation skills.  

• High-energy individual with a positive attitude, good teamwork skills, ability to have excellent customer rapport, and the ability to provide an exceptional customer presentation experience.  

• Persistent but pragmatic: willing to be flexible and adaptable to change.  

• Strong working knowledge of data center infrastructure components. 

• Strong working knowledge of cloud platforms and hypervisor technologies (i.e. VMware, AWS, Hyper-V, Azure, Google Compute Platform, etc.).

• Working knowledge of the MySQL, MS-SQL, and Oracle database environments, including familiarity with typical high-availability deployments.  

• Depth of knowledge of SAN’s and designing storage to meet both performance and size requirements.  

• Working knowledge of data center and IT security best practices . 

• Understanding of DR best practices, with the ability to connect specific technical solutions to business impact in a failover scenario.  

• Customers and prospects feel the credibility that the SE truly understands their needs and is able to understand their questions and offer plausible solutions.   

• Quick on feet – can address the challenges presented during sales conversations and can turn around complex solutions and associated documentation quickly and accurately.  

• Easily adaptable to a fast-paced business environment. 

Physical Requirements:  

• Ability to work in an office environment.  

• Ability to work remotely when required with sufficient workspace, cell phone connectivity, and an adequate Internet connection. 

• Ability to use the computer keyboard and mouse for extended periods of time.  

• After-hours networking and customer interaction required.  

• Travel 30-50% of the time. 

Base Pay Range: Annualized salary range offered for this position is estimated to be $190,000 - $210,000. However, the actual pay range depends on each candidate’s experience, location, and qualifications.

Variable Pay: This role is eligible for commission. The expected annual commission range is $50,000  - $65,000, based on achievement of targets and other performance indicators.

Location: This role is supporting our Southeast Data Center locations. We are open to candidates who are near our Atlanta, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Charlotte locations, or open to traveling to these locations.

This position has the following safety hazards: