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

Role overview

Serve as the senior technical lead for higher-education accounts across the Mid-Atlantic, focusing on large research universities with complex environments spanning central IT, high-performance computing, AI and machine-learning labs, research cores, medical centers, and faculty-led projects. The work combines consultative pre-sales, solution design, technical validation, and business-case development. You will help institutions connect infrastructure and data-management decisions to research outcomes, compliance obligations, long-term usability, and budget realities.

Responsibilities

- Understand institutional priorities, research programs, funding cycles, purchasing processes, and the stakeholders involved in technical and financial decisions. - Translate infrastructure and data-platform capabilities into measurable outcomes for researchers, IT leaders, finance teams, procurement groups, and principal investigators. - Design solutions supporting workflows from instrument and sequencer output through HPC and AI pipelines, retention, archival, and data sharing. - Advise on data lifecycle, reproducibility, governance, sponsor requirements, security controls, and applicable research-compliance standards. - Lead evaluations, benchmarks, proofs of concept, configurations, and technical validation through to a successful outcome. - Partner with account teams, specialists, channel partners, and purchasing consortia while preparing responses to detailed RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs.

Requirements

- At least 8 years of relevant experience in technology, solution design, and customer-facing technical communication. - Pre-sales, solutions engineering, consulting, or another customer-facing technical background. - Broad technical depth across at least two areas such as cloud, HPC, AI/ML infrastructure, data management, core infrastructure, analytics, or business applications. - Ability to communicate effectively with researchers, technical staff, executive leaders, finance, and procurement audiences. - Strong skills in requirements discovery, solution architecture, presentations, written proposals, and business-value analysis.

Nice to have

- Experience with research computing, higher education, grant-funded purchasing, public-sector contracts, or consortium procurement. - Familiarity with research data governance, NIST 800-171, CMMC, or related security and compliance expectations. - Knowledge of enterprise, file, block, or object storage and adjacent data-management platforms.

Benefits and work setup

The role supports a remote arrangement and covers institutions in the Mid-Atlantic, including Maryland and Virginia. The package may include incentive compensation or equity, flexible time off, wellness resources, and team activities.