Purestorage Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer supporting Higher Education business with a focus on R1 research universities. Lead technical engagements to build solutions that align technology with research and institutional outcomes.
Responsibilities
Location: Michigan or Indiana
Develop a real understanding of what drives each institution: research priorities, funding cycles, capital versus operating constraints, and who actually makes the decision
Connect technology, including the Everpure portfolio and the broader ecosystem, to measurable research and institutional outcomes
Move fluently between principal investigators, research computing staff, central IT, CIOs, finance, and procurement, adapting the conversation to each audience instead of delivering the same presentation
Build the business case alongside the technical one: total cost of ownership, power and cooling, data center footprint, staff time, and the real cost of the current environment
Support research workloads end to end, from instrument and sequencer output through HPC and AI pipelines to long-term retention and archive
Help customers work through data management questions: lifecycle and retention, reproducibility, sponsor and funding agency data sharing expectations, research data governance, and security requirements such as NIST 800-171 and CMMC where they apply
Partner closely with account managers, specialists, channel partners, and higher education purchasing consortia and contract vehicles
Take ownership of evaluations, benchmarks, proofs of concept, and system configurations, and secure the technical win
Capture requirements and translate them into solutions that help institutions grow their research capability rather than just their capacity
Author responses to RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs, which in this segment are frequent and detailed
Stay current on the competitive landscape and make sure our positioning reflects it honestly