Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer, Higher Education (IN/MI)

Role overview Lead the technical pre-sales work for higher-education customers, especially research-intensive universities. You’ll help varied campus stakeholders connect infrastructure choices to research outcomes, operational constraints, security needs, and long-term data use, while working with account teams and partners to shape solutions that are technically sound and financially defensible.

Responsibilities - Learn each institution’s research priorities, funding cycles, purchasing processes, and decision-making structure. - Translate technology options and ecosystem components into measurable institutional and research outcomes, adapting discussions for researchers, IT, finance, and procurement audiences. - Develop technical and financial cases that consider total cost, power and cooling, data-center footprint, staffing, and current operating costs. - Support research data workflows from instruments and sequencing through HPC and AI processing to long-term retention and archiving. - Advise on data lifecycle, reproducibility, sharing obligations, governance, and applicable security requirements. - Lead evaluations, benchmarks, proofs of concept, and configurations; capture requirements, prepare RFI/RFP/RFQ responses, and collaborate with account teams, partners, and purchasing consortia.

Requirements - At least 8 years of relevant experience spanning technology, solution design, and customer-facing communication. - Experience in pre-sales or another customer-facing technical role. - Experience with higher education, research computing, academic medical centers, or the public sector. - Familiarity with HPC and AI environments, including parallel or distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, schedulers such as Slurm, and research data pipelines.

Benefits and work setup The position is based in Michigan or Indiana and is described as remote. The source lists a base salary range of $141,400–$212,100, with possible incentive pay or equity. It also describes flexible time off, wellness resources, and company-sponsored team events.