Index Ventures

Position Purpose

Big Data is exploding as organizations across the world are deploying Apache Hadoop to derive business meaningful insights. Customers are starving for Data Platform Engineers whom are energetic Pre-Sales Engineers that have and hone a diverse range of talents, beyond the technical. Equally important, nothing can substitute for the hands-on demonstration when it comes to closing a deal, therefore deep technical skills are a must.

As a Solution Engineer you will utilize your strong technical, business competencies and customer service orientation to provide the highest level of business and technical consultation to sales teams, prospects and customers to support sales goals. You will work on cross-functional teams including Sales, Product Management, Product Marketing, Services, Business Development, Training and Engineering to create solutions that provides the immense business value. You will become intimately acquainted with customers’ business requirements, technical needs, systems, environment and service history, enabling you to present targeted business solutions. A successful Solution Engineer has the heart of a salesperson wrapped in the mind of an IT pro.

Essential Functions:

Educate the prospects in how their business priorities (use cases) map to Hadoop solutions and integrate with the ecosystem
Understand the customer’s customer, what business each of the business units are in and their criterion for success
Interface with account and partner teams to share account insight and solicit inclusion for increasing account penetration, revenues and deal size
You will utilize your excellent technical and relationship building skills in working with prospects, customers, vendors, partners and sales to ensure that optimum systems solutions are provided to customers.
Understand prospect “insiders” and how competition sells to the account. Develop insights from this and from public sources
Start the journey of being a trusted and business advisor to the community and your customer base by balancing customers success criterion with Hortonworks aspirations
Understand the vast immature and mature Hadoop ecosystem unfolding and apply to your customers’ business priorities
Grow your vast technical acumen on Apache Hadoop, the ecosystem and customer critical and specific solutions
Stay ahead and on top of all new product features and fixes
Provide technical consultation and education to the Sales team by keeping them apprised on new product information
Limited management supervision and direction is provided. This individual will operate independently and drive results as a team and as an individual
Ability to pass US Government security clearances highly desirable
Identify customer needs and requirements
Define all of the elements of a customer's technical computing environments
Answer customer questions
Provide technical support to current customer and 'try-and-buy' test projects
Define customer acceptance criteria for 'try-and-buy' evaluation projects
Work with Sales to respond to RFP's
Attend customer calls with the Sales Representative
Provide technical consultation and disseminate product information to the sales team
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Good interpersonal communication and customer service skills are needed in orderwork successfully with prospects, customers, and cross functional teams to meet performance goals
Account management and project management experience
Strong aptitude for learning new technologies and understanding how to utilize them in a customer-facing environment.
Ability to follow standard engineering principles and practices
Creative approach to problem solving
Travel to the prospective customer's sites as necessary
Excellent Prospect and Partner presentation skills



Desired Skills and Experience:

Experience with core enabling technologies, networking, Unix, Linux, Window operating systems, building and managing compute farms, scripting and java programming, and/or data warehousing solutions.
Experience using and developing infrastructure solutions including but not limited to: Apache Hadoop, (HDFS, MapReduce, Common), Hive, Pig, Sqoop,Oozie, Ambari, HCatalog, Zookeeper, and Flume
Experience with enterprise scale distributed NoSQL solutions including but not limited to: HBase, Cassandra, Riak, MongoDB, etc.
Experience with Enterprise Data Warehouses including but not limited to: Teradata, Netezza,Exadata, MSSQL PDW and GreenPlum

Hortonworks is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We welcome job applications from qualified individuals without regard to race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, national origin, age, sex, pregnancy, marital status, sexual orientation, physical or mental disability, or any other protected characteristics.

About Hortonworks, Inc.

Apache Hadoop™ is the principal opensource Cloud Computing platform for storing, managing, processing and analyzing “Big Data”. Most leading Internet and Social Networking businesses use it, along with other companies around the globe. We believe that more than half of the world’s data will be stored in Hadoop environments within five years.

Hortonworks, Inc. is a dynamic startup, created to accelerate the development and adoption of Apache Hadoop. Together with the Apache open-source community, we are making Hadoop more powerful, more robust, and easier to install, manage and use. We also provide support and training for Apache Hadoop.