Director, Systems Engineering (Pre-Sales/Solution Architecture) (Washington DC/Virginia)

Qumulo is the leading provider of enterprise-scale, high-performance data storage and management solutions. They are seeking a dynamic, customer-facing Director of Systems Engineering to lead their team of Pre-Sales Solution Architects and guide the technical sales strategy to empower customers and drive business growth.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of Pre-Sales Solution Architects across regions and verticals
• Foster a customer-first, high-performance culture centered around technical excellence, collaboration, and accountability
• Drive hiring, onboarding, continuous training, and career development programs for the SE team
• Establish and maintain technical sales best practices, methodologies, and playbooks
• Define and drive Qumulo’s technical pre-sales strategy to support revenue growth, competitive wins, and customer satisfaction
• Oversee the creation and delivery of compelling product demos, solution designs, technical evaluations, and proof-of-concept (PoC) engagements
• Ensure alignment between Sales, Product, Engineering and Marketing on customer requirements, use cases, and competitive positioning
• Partner with Product Management to influence roadmap direction based on real-world customer needs and technical trends
• Serve as an executive technical leader in strategic customer engagements, helping shape solution strategy and ensuring customer confidence
• Guide SEs in conducting discovery sessions, architectural reviews, sizing and performance analysis, and workload assessments
• Act as a key escalation point during technical evaluations and PoCs, ensuring successful outcomes
• Represent Qumulo as a technical expert at customer meetings, industry conferences, webinars, and partner events
• Drive repeatable, scalable pre-sales processes, tools, and documentation
• Track SE performance through KPIs involving pipeline support, PoC success rate, competitive wins, and customer satisfaction
• Ensure the SE organization is trained on the latest Qumulo capabilities, cloud integrations, industry trends, and competitive dynamics, while also maintaining expertise in adjacent and complementary technologies
• Champion continuous improvement efforts across technical messaging, demos, solution architecture, and PoC frameworks

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience in systems engineering, solutions architecture, technical pre-sales, or related customer-facing technical roles
• 5+ years of leadership experience managing solutions engineering or technical pre-sales teams
• Strong expertise in distributed systems, storage architectures, file and object protocols (NFS, SMB, S3), cloud technologies, and performance optimization
• Demonstrated success leading technical evaluations, PoCs, and architectural design engagements with enterprise customers
• Excellent communication and executive-level presentation skills
• Ability to partner effectively with Sales leadership and influence strategic opportunities
• Experience with large-scale unstructured data solutions, data center infrastructure, cloud-native architectures, or hybrid-cloud deployments
• Prior experience in high-growth technology companies or building/transforming SE organizations
• Familiarity with verticals such as M&E, healthcare imaging, research computing, or public sector
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field
• Located in Washington, DC/Virgina