Solutions Engineer, Bay Area

Aerospike is looking for a technically sharp, enterprise-focused Solutions Engineer to help drive adoption and shape the technical vision of our blazing-fast, real-time data platform across North America. In this high-impact pre-sales role, you’ll partner closely with account teams and executive stakeholders to lead architecture design, translate complex enterprise requirements into scalable blueprints, and prove clear, compelling value for our prospective customers. Based in North America, you’ll serve as the principal technical advisor and enterprise architect throughout the sales lifecycle — from high-level discovery and architectural design to proof-of-concept (POC) governance and post-sale deployment strategy. Whether it’s designing fault-tolerant, high-throughput database topologies, addressing complex data modeling challenges, or leading strategic technical discussions, your expertise will be key to helping enterprise clients realize the power of Aerospike. This is a pre-sales engineering & architecture position. Responsibilities • Engineer for advantage: Lead technical discovery and design creative, multi-region architectures that solve demanding data, scale, latency, and resilience requirements. • Master the data plane: Bring deep expertise in databases, distributed systems, data platforms, and high-throughput workloads—and make complex technology decisions clear to every audience. • Sell the architecture and the outcome: Connect technical choices to business value, competitive differentiation, ROI, and the customer’s broader data strategy. • Create conviction through proof: Design and lead rigorous POCs, benchmarks, whiteboarding sessions, demos, and architecture reviews that validate performance, scalability, and business impact. • Be the technical deal strategist: Partner tightly with Account Executives to shape deal strategy, multi-thread stakeholders, neutralize architectural risk, and advance complex opportunities. • Unblock with ingenuity: Diagnose hard customer problems, develop practical solutions, and turn technical objections into reasons to buy. • Turn field insight into leverage: Capture recurring requirements, architectural patterns, and competitive intelligence to influence Product, Engineering, Customer Success, partners, and enablement. • Close as the trusted technical authority: Lead executive and engineering conversations across North America and help convert technical credibility into regional revenue. Qualifications • Command the room: Bring exceptional executive presence, communication, and presentation skills to earn credibility with C-level leaders, principal architects, and developers. • Architect across the data stack: Demonstrate deep expertise in NoSQL, relational databases, distributed systems, MPP data warehouses, and specialized platforms such as graph, time-series, and AI/ML feature stores. • Build for real-world scale: Bring hands-on Linux experience and a strong understanding of high-concurrency, high-throughput, mission-critical, and zero-downtime systems. • Think in distributed systems: Apply practical knowledge of Spark, Hadoop, HBase, HDFS, Hive, Impala, and adjacent data-processing ecosystems to solve complex customer problems. • Win technical evaluations: Guide enterprise prospects through demanding architecture reviews, competitive bake-offs, POCs, and time-sensitive decisions with structure, urgency, and sound judgment. • Solve what others cannot: Use exceptional analytical, troubleshooting, and architectural problem-solving skills to isolate root causes and design elegant, executable solutions. • Operate as a strategic self-starter: Manage complex evaluations, competing stakeholders, and shifting priorities with minimal oversight while keeping the commercial objective in view. • Translate the field into product leverage: Capture customer requirements and convert them into precise, actionable feedback for Product Management, Engineering, and R&D. • Advocate where developers learn: Represent Aerospike through architecture workshops, developer meetups, hackathons, technical content, and industry events. • Code with credibility: Bring software engineering experience and strong coding ability in at least one core language, including Java, C/C++, Python, or Go. Preferred Qualifications • Know distributed databases in production: Bring deep operational or architectural expertise with Aerospike or comparable platforms such as CockroachDB, Yugabyte, MongoDB, Cassandra, or Couchbase. • Architect across the cloud frontier: Hold advanced AWS, Azure, or GCP certifications—or demonstrate equivalent hands-on expertise designing secure, scalable, production-grade cloud environments. • Build cloud-native systems: Show strong command of microservices, containers, Docker, Kubernetes, and the operational patterns required to run distributed applications at scale. • Understand performance below the application layer: Diagnose the impact of networking protocols, CPU architecture, NVMe and SSD behavior, memory hierarchy, and other hardware dynamics on system performance. • Bring pre-sales pattern recognition: Have experience as a Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, or Principal Consultant in a high-growth technology company, with a track record of influencing complex enterprise decisions. • Be field-ready: Willing and able to travel up to 30% across North America to support customers, prospects, partners, and technical events. Salary Range : $220,000 – $260,000 (Actual compensation will be based on experience, location, and other relevant factors.) Aerospike is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to an environment free from discrimination based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, or veteran status. To keep our recruitment pipeline as high-performance as our database, Aerospike uses AI-driven tools to streamline resume reviews, scheduling, and communication. While we love smart tech, we value human connection even more. AI helps us optimize the process, but real people make 100% of the actual hiring decisions.