Presales Solutions Architect - Observability

AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation. At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD.  We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual's race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived.  We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD.  If you thrive in an entrepreneurial environment and desire to become a thought leader and team member of an established, forward thinking and growing organization, AHEAD will take your career to the next level.  Members of our Specialty Solutions Engineering team have the opportunity to enhance their skill set, by leveraging not only technologies you are fully versed in but are invited to learn all technologies in our portfolio.  This allows our team to develop the proper solutions to meet our customer’s desired business outcomes, while building your brand and career.  Our customers may be new to Monitoring & Observability practices or have deep rooted processes and technologies that require enhancements or maturity, to support their journey towards digital transformation. The ideal candidate is an independent, self-driven thought leader, who enjoys interfacing with customers and team members and desires to drive innovative business solutions by applying their technical and business skills.  This role partners with sales, delivery and solution engineering peers to achieve customer success, through thought leadership and driving awareness. The role takes a consultative approach with our customers and prospects to discover and map business outcome-driven solutions. The role also will require demonstration and prototyping of platform capabilities and in select cases identify the specific requirements needed to develop innovative application prototypes. The Monitoring & Observability Pre-Sales Solutions Engineer will also provide solutions and enablement to the technical salesforce and provide prospective customers with product and solution advice during pre-sales discussions.  Responsibilities:

Partnering with our sales team in client meetings 

Drive innovative business solutions and digital transformation with our customers 

Consult with customers and prospects to understand their needs and pain-points and drive solutions based on the AHEAD portfolio of products and services 

Architect solutions both independently and collaboratively  

Demonstrate live to customers and prospects the features and functionality of recommended solutions  

Conduct business process and/or technical workshops that may include enablement sessions. 

Interact with the AHEAD community as a thought leader on solutioning products 

Providing technical expertise on streaming big data architectures, log indexing and analytics, SIEM, APM/Observability 

Interface with customers, sales, and delivery teams to translate business challenges into requirements and deliverables. 

Thrive in a fast-paced growing company 

Develop documentation, pricing, and statements of work for customers 

Learn other portfolio technologies, from a high level, that may enhance the customer’s experience 

Obtain and maintain certifications for the different product lines available, as related to this position  

Evaluate product placement as it compares to other products in this vertical 

Develop and maintain an up-to-date demo lab with defined integrations 

Create enabling content and opinionated guidance on solutions for both clients and internal stakeholders, including sales and marketing staff. 

Qualifications:

2+ years technical experience with full stack Observability platforms such as AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, Sumo Logic, Grafana Labs, Elastic and similar 

3+ Infrastructure specific change management, configuration and monitoring solutions, such as Logic Monitor, SolarWinds, Nagios, etc 

2+ years technical experience with log management solutions as a stand along capability/product or part of a suite of tools, such as Splunk Enterprise, Splunk Cloud, Sumo Logic, ElasticSearch/Logstash/Kibana, Dynatrace, Datadog, Loki/Grafana, etc.  

5+ years acting as a consultant for clients, advising on technical solutions and participating in pre-sales and solution development. 

Enterprise experience with Cloud Infrastructure, networking and system administration, automation and advanced configuration management, including tools such as Terraform, Ansible, and vendor specific control planes 

2+ years of technical experience with telemetry collection agents/techniques, and telemetry pipeline tools like Cribl, Dynatrace OpenPipeline, Datadog Vector, Grepr, etc. 

Experience in architecture leadership that brings together and integrates solutions across multiple vendors 

Ability to evaluate new technologies and provide internal training 

Ability to understand customer needs, define requirements, and design solutions 

Ability to develop and present architectural recommendations and implementation/ assessment services 

Excellent written and verbal communication skills 

Excellent presentation skills 

Extensive experience with Visio and PowerPoint 

Strong technical aptitude 

Provide technical leadership assuring quality, maximizing team output 

Self-motivated 

Experience with event management systems like ServiceNow Event Management, Big Panda, PagerDuty AIOps is a plus 

Experience with Incident, Problem and Change Management, Asset/Portfolio Management, CMDB tools and processes is a plus