Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer, Higher Education (Mid-Atlantic)

THE ROLE

Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) is hiring a Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer to support our Higher Education business, with a focus on R1 research universities.

R1 institutions are not one customer. A single campus can behave like a dozen different organizations at the same time: central IT running enterprise applications, research computing and HPC teams, genomics and imaging cores, AI and machine learning labs competing for GPU time, an academic medical center with its own rules and its own budget, and faculty groups buying infrastructure directly with grant money. Decisions move through CIOs, research computing directors, principal investigators, sponsored programs offices, procurement, and consortium contract vehicles, often in parallel and not always in agreement.

That environment rewards someone who can hold a lot of context at once, translate between very different audiences, and connect technology to the outcomes these institutions actually care about: time to result for researchers, compliance with sponsor and grant requirements, data that stays usable for a decade or more, and budgets that have to stretch further every year.

You will be the technical lead on these accounts, working alongside account managers, specialists, and partners to build solutions customers can defend internally, both technically and financially.

Location: MD / VA

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Develop a real understanding of what drives each institution: research priorities, funding cycles, capital versus operating constraints, and who actually makes the decision
• Connect technology, including the Everpure portfolio and the broader ecosystem, to measurable research and institutional outcomes
• Move fluently between principal investigators, research computing staff, central IT, CIOs, finance, and procurement, adapting the conversation to each audience instead of delivering the same presentation
• Build the business case alongside the technical one: total cost of ownership, power and cooling, data center footprint, staff time, and the real cost of the current environment
• Support research workloads end to end, from instrument and sequencer output through HPC and AI pipelines to long-term retention and archive
• Help customers work through data management questions: lifecycle and retention, reproducibility, sponsor and funding agency data sharing expectations, research data governance, and security requirements such as NIST 800-171 and CMMC where they apply
• Partner closely with account managers, specialists, channel partners, and higher education purchasing consortia and contract vehicles
• Take ownership of evaluations, benchmarks, proofs of concept, and system configurations, and secure the technical win
• Capture requirements and translate them into solutions that help institutions grow their research capability rather than just their capacity
• Author responses to RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs, which in this segment are frequent and detailed
• Stay current on the competitive landscape and make sure our positioning reflects it honestly
• Follow market and research computing trends closely enough to bring that thinking back into our organization
• Lead by example living the Pure Values: Persistence, Creativity, Teamwork, Ownership and Customer-first

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

Required

• 8 or more years of relevant experience across technology, solution design, and customer-facing communication
• Pre-sales or customer-facing technical experience
• Experience with higher education, research computing, academic medical centers, or the public sector
• Familiarity with HPC and AI environments: parallel and distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, schedulers such as Slurm, and data pipelines for genomics, imaging, or simulation
• Broad technical depth across two or more of: cloud, HPC, AI and machine learning infrastructure, data management, core infrastructure, analytics, or financial and business applications. A career built entirely inside storage is not what we are looking for
• A track record of selling on value: uncovering what the customer is trying to accomplish and connecting technology to business, operational, and financial outcomes
• The ability to hold credible conversations with engineers, architects, executives, data scientists, researchers, finance teams, and procurement, and to adjust the message for each
• Comfort with ambiguity, and the judgment to challenge assumptions and help customers think through complicated decisions
• Curiosity, empathy, an open mind, and a genuine appetite for continuous learning
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• BS in CS, EE, another technical degree, or equivalent experience

Helpful, but not required

• Knowledge of current and emerging storage architectures (FC, iSCSI, NAS, SAN, object) and file systems
• Linux, NFS, and distributed Linux environments
• VMware, Ethernet, TCP/IP, and general networking
• AWS, Azure, or GCP, and hybrid or cloud-native architectures
• Containers, Kubernetes, and microservices
• Data-intensive applications such as structured databases (SQL, Oracle) and analytics platforms
• Experience with grant-funded procurement, consortium purchasing, or public sector contract vehicles
• Experience with higher education, research computing, academic medical centers
• Familiarity with HPC, research and AI environments: parallel and distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, schedulers such as Slurm, and data pipelines for genomics, imaging, or simulation

If you meet most of the required list and few of the second list, we would still like to hear from you.

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