Solutions Architect, Data Center (Chicago, Milwaukee)

Presidio - Chicago, IL

Full-time - Mid Level

Chicago, IL

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

About the position

Presidio is on the leading edge of a technology-driven movement to transform the way business is done, for our customers and our customers' customers. Joining Presidio means immersing yourself in a culture of self-starters, collaborators, and innovators who make real, lasting change in the marketplace via cutting-edge technology and business solutions. At Presidio, we know that it's our people that make the connections happen. We have a great opportunity for a Solutions Architect - Datacenter in Chicago or Milwaukee. The Solutions Architect - Datacenter is a pre-sales resource that leads the consultative discovery of our customers' business objectives and translates them into effective datacenter solutions. As a Solutions Architect, your primary responsibility will be to sell and architect industry-leading compute, storage, virtualization, and cloud solutions from our primary vendors, including Dell/EMC, Pure, Cisco, VMware, Nutanix, AWS, and Azure. You will be responsible for leading pre-sales activities, including proposal development, proof-of-concept construction, demonstrations, roadmaps, and architecture design sessions. You will also author statements of work around the professional services we provide in the datacenter business.

Responsibilities

• Position yourself as a trusted advisor with our customers, and partner with them to understand their requirements and business needs.
• Provide recommendations to customers with respect to solutions and strategies.
• Partner with our vendor-partners to build trusted relationships and expertise.
• Create functional designs, reference architectures, and assist with other project deliverables as needed.
• Design state-of-the-art technical solutions that address customer requirements for resiliency, scalability, security, and performance.
• Create and deliver compelling technical proposals directly to clients, including relevant drawings, diagrams, and analysis.
• Conduct customer-facing demonstrations of products/solutions to enhance the customer experience and sales success outcome.
• Collaborate with other project teams on technical solutions to help improve Presidio intellectual property.
• Stay up to date on all technical developments related to our datacenter business and partners.
• Interact with sales in a trusted and collaborative way to build robust solutions for our customers.
• If required, perform customer assessments in support of design, implementation, and ongoing support.

Requirements

• Strong experience in Cisco UCS, Dell/EMC, and Pure (other storage vendors a plus)
• Basic networking knowledge around core networking, IP, subnetting routing, VPN, DirectConnect, etc.
• Strong experience with virtualization (VMware vSphere, Nutanix)
• Moderate network troubleshooting experience
• Working knowledge of most relevant operating systems (Windows Server, Red Hat Linux, etc.)
• Core understanding of storage technology fundamentals, including RAID, snapshots, deduplication, compression, encryption, SAN/NAS, NFS, iSCSI, etc.
• Strong verbal and written communications skills are a must, as well as the ability to work effectively across internal and external organizations.
• Strong presentation and whiteboarding skills.

Nice-to-haves

• Presales experience and/or experience working with a systems integrator
• AWS and/or Azure experience
• Basic knowledge of automation tools (Puppet, Ansible, vRealize, Terraform, etc.)
• Basic knowledge of container orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes, etc.)
• Basic knowledge of AppDynamics, CloudHealth, etc.
• Data Protection experience with Veeam, Rubrik or Cohesity.