Senior Technologist - Applications Engineering

The Western Digital Platforms Group offers data center ready, next-generation disaggregated storage platforms via our Ultrastar Data, Ultrastar Edge, OpenFlex and RapidFlex portfolios.

One particular focus is helping customers simplify NVMe/NVMe-oF storage deployment, with our enhanced OpenFlex Data24 3200 NVMe-oF JBOF/Storage platform, along with the next-gen RapidFlex A2000 and C2000 NVMe-oF fabric bridge devices (FBDs). These storage solutions are enabling an ecosystem, whilst providing more flexibility and choice for simplifying NVMe and NVMe-oF deployments. Western Digital is currently the only company with vertical integration capabilities targeting both ends of the Ethernet wire to deliver solutions where data travels from the server initiator to the storage target.

In an era where AI/ML is emerging as the most impactful technology in decades, data centers are seeing new class of power and performance hungry GPU AI servers being introduced. This growing demand will require vendors to pivot their solutions to address the challenges presented with such scale; be it in compute, storage, power, cooling and networking. Western Digital’s architectural approach to agnostic storage disaggregation and native ethernet ecosystems allows us to sit at the forefront in addressing these rapidly evolving data center requirements.

Within the Western Digital Platforms BU, the Applications Engineering team’s charter is to provide systems, performance, application, and solutions engineering expertise to help drive product development, product awareness, sales enablement, and end customer solution development / implementation.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Enjoy a diverse set of responsibilities and challenges. Fundamentally you will support our Platforms portfolio by providing advanced technical subject matter expertise and thought leadership and in turn, contribute to the shaping of the technical and business strategy of the Platforms BU.
• Evangelize product at industry events, trade shows, seminars, and customer briefings.
• Forge close collaboration with our technical and strategic partners, professional networks, and customers whilst coordinating internal teams in support of business objectives.
• Provide guidance and best practices to sales teams and help refine sales strategy and tactics.
• Possess extensive experience and detailed knowledge of common industry storage applications (e.g. scale-out filesystems, databases, object storage, hypervisors, composability frameworks), as well as distributed storage and deployment architectures.
• You will understand the latest technological advancements in the enterprise storage space and bring an in-depth understanding of system architectures and high-speed communications interface protocols such as SAS and NVMe-oF (RoCE and TCP) along with their supporting technologies.
• Ideally you will have applied experience with GPU architectures such as NVIDIA CUDA and GPUDirect Storage including associated benchmarking tools (such as MLPerf).
• Act as a subject matter expert for new composable infrastructure products and educate customers and partners on differentiating product technologies.
• Assist sales team members in advancing and closing individual opportunities and take ownership of technical responsibilities within customer engagements.
• Assist customers with evaluations, benchmarks, system configurations, and system installations.
• Provide feedback from partners, customers, and subject matter experts to internal teams to support the definition of new products, product enhancements, and technical collateral.
• Be responsible for the planning, development, and delivery of technical training for sales team members.
• Assist in the development of technical collateral on best practices, proof-of-concept designs, and performance benchmarking methodologies.
• Monitor market trends, customers, and competitors and provide strategies to counter competitors.
• Be an expert in product use and keep up to date with technological advances.
• Participate in the creation and implementation of product positioning and messaging.
• Participate in the development of high impact sales tools.
• Engage in joint presentations with sales for key customers and be comfortable managing complex conversations with both technical and non-technical stakeholders by demonstrating excellent presentation, explanatory and expectation handling skills.
• Whilst leading by example, mentoring, and guiding junior team members and encouraging a culture of continuous learning and development within the team is a core value within Applications Engineering that you will be expected to uphold.
• Travel is required for this role. Travel will primarily be domestic with occasional international travel. Travel would be for industry events, customer meetings, and internal meetings at department locations (e.g. Colorado Springs, Co, San Jose, Ca).

Requirements

REQUIRED

• Bachelor’s degree in EE, Computer Science or Computer Engineering preferred, a degree in Marketing or a related field with a technical focus will also be considered.
• Strong background (8-10 years) in data center storage and related technologies as a development engineer, applications engineer, product line manager or in a technical marketing or program management position.
• 10+ years proven experience in a role directly supporting field operations for data center storage products.
• Experience in authoring technical documents presentations, best practices guides, and white papers.
• Proven ability to work cross-functionally with Sales, Engineering, Business Operations, Product Marketing and Customer service and support.

SKILLS

• Strong experience in networking is a plus.
• Excellent verbal, written, and presentation development skills with the ability to convey complex ideas in a clear and simplified manner.