Pre-Sales Storage Engineer

Travel Requirement: Up to 50%, primarily domestic with occasional international travel

Position Overview
Nexsan is seeking a Pre-Sales Storage Engineer to support Regional Sales Managers, channel partners, distributors, and customers throughout the pre-sales and early deployment lifecycle.

This position serves as a technical authority during customer engagements and is responsible for technical discovery, solution design, presentations, demonstrations, proofs of concept (POCs), partner enablement, technical validation, and support of strategic installations.

The ideal candidate combines strong enterprise storage expertise with excellent customer-facing and communication skills. This individual must be comfortable working with both technical and executive audiences, developing strong relationships with channel partners, managing multiple opportunities, and translating complex customer requirements into practical, secure, resilient, and cost-effective storage solutions.

Key Responsibilities
Sales and Customer Engagement

• Partner closely with Regional Sales Managers to support customer and partner opportunities throughout the sales cycle.
• Participate in technical discovery sessions to understand customer workloads, infrastructure, security requirements, operational challenges, and business objectives.
• Design and recommend storage solutions aligned with customer technical requirements and industry best practices.
• Lead technical discussions, whiteboard sessions, architecture reviews, and solution presentations.
• Clearly communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and executive audiences.
• Serve as the primary technical point of contact during the pre-sales process.
• Maintain strong relationships with customer technical teams, partner engineers, distributors, and other key stakeholders.
• Proactively engage with partners and customers to identify upcoming projects, technical requirements, and potential opportunities.

Solution Design and Technical Validation

• Develop storage architectures supporting block, file, and object storage requirements.
• Perform capacity planning, solution sizing, configuration development, and technical validation.
• Evaluate customer environments and recommend appropriate architectures based on performance, capacity, resiliency, security, compliance, and budget requirements.
• Ensure proposed configurations follow Nexsan best practices and meet customer expectations.
• Assist Sales with technical responses for proposals, RFPs, RFIs, and other customer requirements.

Proofs of Concept and Demonstrations

• Architect, deploy, manage, and support customer and partner POCs.
• Establish clear POC objectives, technical requirements, timelines, and success criteria.
• Configure and validate systems used during customer evaluations.
• Deliver live and remote product demonstrations tailored to specific customer workloads and use cases.
• Troubleshoot configuration, performance, interoperability, and integration issues during evaluations.
• Document POC results and communicate outcomes, recommendations, and next steps to customers, partners, and internal teams.

Channel Partner and Distributor Enablement

• Provide ongoing technical support and enablement to channel partners, resellers, and distributors.
• Develop and maintain strong working relationships with partner Systems Engineers and technical teams.
• Conduct partner training sessions, workshops, demonstrations, and hands-on technical enablement.
• Participate in partner and distributor customer meetings as the Nexsan technical resource.
• Assist partners in developing repeatable solution architectures, configurations, and best practices.
• Serve as a technical escalation resource for partners during the sales process.
• Help increase partner technical competency and confidence in positioning Nexsan solutions.

Installations and Early Deployment Support

• Assist with or lead customer installations for strategic, complex, or high-value deployments as required.
• Support initial system configuration, implementation, and best-practice validation.
• Validate that deployed solutions align with the approved architecture and customer requirements.
• Troubleshoot technical issues encountered during initial deployment.
• Coordinate with Nexsan Support and other internal teams to ensure a smooth transition from pre-sales to post-sales support.
• Provide technical knowledge transfer to customers and partners following installation.

Technical Content, Presentations, and Sales Tools

• Develop and maintain professional customer-facing Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.
• Create solution overviews, architectural diagrams, technical presentations, and executive summaries.
• Use Microsoft Excel for capacity planning, solution sizing, configuration modeling, technical analysis, and POC tracking.
• Contribute to technical documentation, reference architectures, best-practice guides, competitive tools, and partner training materials.
• Develop repeatable technical tools and resources that improve Sales and partner effectiveness.
• Maintain accurate documentation related to active POCs, technical evaluations, configurations, and customer requirements.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Collaborate closely with Sales, Product Management, Engineering, Support, Marketing, and Operations.
• Provide structured feedback from customers and partners regarding product requirements, competitive issues, feature requests, and market trends.
• Communicate recurring field challenges and recommend improvements to products, documentation, tools, and internal processes.
• Support Product Management and Engineering with validation of new features or solutions when appropriate.
• Maintain knowledge of Nexsan products, competitive technologies, industry trends, and emerging storage requirements.

Core Technologies and Solution Areas
Candidates should have experience with or a strong understanding of several of the following areas:

• Enterprise storage architectures.
• Block storage technologies and protocols, including Fibre Channel and iSCSI.
• File storage technologies and protocols, including SMB and NFS.
• Object storage and S3-based architectures.
• SAN and NAS environments.
• Backup, recovery, disaster recovery, and data protection architectures.
• Immutable storage and ransomware-resilient storage strategies.
• WORM, data retention, legal hold, and compliance-driven storage.
• Virtualized server environments.
• Unstructured data and high-capacity storage workloads.
• On-premises and hybrid infrastructure environments.
• Enterprise networking concepts related to storage deployments.
• Storage performance, capacity planning, availability, and resiliency.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.
• Minimum of 5 years of experience in a Systems Engineering, Sales Engineering, Solutions Engineering, or pre-sales technical role.
• Strong understanding of enterprise storage technologies, architectures, and protocols.
• Experience supporting enterprise or upper mid-market customer environments.
• Experience working with channel partners, resellers, distributors, or technology alliances.
• Hands-on experience delivering technical presentations and product demonstrations.
• Experience architecting and supporting customer POCs and technical evaluations.
• Hands-on experience with customer installations, configurations, or deployment activities.
• Strong Microsoft PowerPoint skills with the ability to develop polished technical and executive presentations.
• Strong Microsoft Excel skills for capacity planning, sizing, modeling, tracking, and technical analysis.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to explain technical concepts clearly to audiences with varying levels of technical expertise.
• Ability to manage multiple customer engagements and priorities simultaneously.
• Strong troubleshooting, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
• Willingness and ability to travel up to 50%.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working within a 100% channel or channel-first sales organization.
• Experience with enterprise storage hardware manufacturers.
• Experience with backup and recovery platforms and architectures.
• Knowledge of immutable storage, secure archives, or ransomware-resilient infrastructure.
• Familiarity with regulatory, security, and compliance-driven environments.
• Experience supporting regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, government, education, or law enforcement.
• Experience with virtualization and enterprise data protection technologies.
• Previous experience conducting technical partner training and enablement.

Key Personal Attributes
The successful candidate will be:

• Customer-focused: Understands customer objectives and develops solutions that address both technical and business requirements.
• Consultative: Able to uncover requirements, ask effective questions, and recommend appropriate solutions rather than simply presenting products.
• Technically credible: Comfortable engaging with storage administrators, infrastructure architects, security teams, IT leadership, and executive stakeholders.
• Relationship-oriented: Proactively develops strong relationships with partners, distributors, customers, and internal teams.
• Proactive: Takes initiative to move technical evaluations, customer engagements, and partner activities forward.
• Organized: Effectively manages multiple opportunities, POCs, partner engagements, installations, and priorities.
• Collaborative: Works effectively across Sales, Product Management, Engineering, Support, and other functional teams.
• Detail-oriented: Produces accurate configurations, documentation, technical recommendations, and customer deliverables.
• Adaptable: Comfortable working in changing customer environments and responding to evolving priorities.
• Committed to continuous learning: Maintains current knowledge of storage technologies, competitive solutions, security requirements, and industry trends.

Working Conditions and Physical Requirements

• Remote home-office environment based in Arizona.
• Frequent interaction with customers, partners, distributors, and Nexsan employees through video conferencing, telephone, and in-person meetings.
• Travel of up to 50%, primarily within the United States, with occasional international travel.
• Ability to travel by commercial air and ground transportation.
• Ability to transport, lift, and move demonstration or installation equipment as reasonably required for the position.

Performance Expectations
Performance will be evaluated based on:

• Technical competency and knowledge of Nexsan solutions.
• Quality and accuracy of solution designs and configurations.
• Effectiveness in supporting Regional Sales Managers and advancing sales opportunities.
• Quality and execution of customer demonstrations, POCs, and technical evaluations.
• Responsiveness and effectiveness in supporting partners and distributors.
• Development and maintenance of strong partner and customer technical relationships.
• Quality of customer installations and early deployment support.
• Contribution to partner training and technical enablement.
• Accuracy and quality of technical documentation, presentations, sizing tools, and other sales resources.
• Effective management of multiple opportunities and technical priorities.
• Adherence to company processes and documentation requirements.
• Proactive communication and collaboration with Sales, Product Management, Engineering, Support, and other internal teams.
• Quality and usefulness of feedback provided from the field.

Why Nexsan
Nexsan delivers secure, reliable, high-performance, and cost-effective enterprise storage solutions for organizations with demanding data requirements.

Operating through a 100% channel-driven sales model, Nexsan gives its Pre-Sales Storage Engineers the opportunity to work closely with partners and customers, influence complex technology decisions, and remain actively involved in solution architecture, demonstrations, technical evaluations, and real-world deployments.

This role offers the opportunity to work across a broad range of enterprise storage use cases, including primary storage, backup and recovery, ransomware protection, immutable storage, compliance, virtualization, high-capacity environments, and unstructured data.

Please apply by sending your resume to jobs@nexsan.com