Senior Solutions Advisor (Pre-sales Engineer)

About the Team

Posit’s Solutions Advisor team (SA) aims to reduce the distance between the customers of our Professional Products and our Pro and Open Source offerings.

We help our customers – especially their IT/SysAdmin teams – understand, and evaluate our professional products, starting them  on a path toward successful installation and adoption. We aim to bring curiosity and empathy to every customer engagement, learning about the pain the customer experiences trying to get value from Open-Source Data Science.

But that’s only half the job.

As we learn about what customers want and need, we use that knowledge to improve our products, documentation, and sales processes.

As a Solutions Advisor, you’ll play an important role in both empowering individual customers and making Posit and our products work better in the future.

People who thrive in this role tend to:

• Find joy in working directly with customers and prospects in sales cycles.  This role is pre-sales focused and at least 50% customer-facing.
  
  
• Have some exposure to data science. Many people on the team are ex-data scientists, and you’ll spend a lot of time talking to customers about data science workflows and use cases. It’s worth noting that you won’t be doing data science or writing code daily.
  
  
• Be interested in the server infrastructure and architecture that underlies enterprise data science. Most of our conversations with customers are with IT teams and System Administrators. Some SAs arrive at Posit with limited exposure to these things but have some demonstrated interest (for example, maybe you’ve run your own RStudio or Shiny server, become an accidental AWS admin, or become the go-to person for help with Docker containers).
  
  
• Be hungry and humble. Solutions Advising covers an impossibly broad technical scope. Great SAs quickly admit what they don’t know and constantly seek to learn more.
  
  
• Find excitement in having many demands on your time, rather than overwhelm. The SA team has close relationships with almost every other team at Posit. There’s no limit to the different projects SAs could take on, being able to choose important things (with help and guidance from managers) and ignore distractions is a key skill for a Posit SA.

What you’ll own own:

• Technical pre-sales calls where you’ll learn what prospective customers want from Posit’s Pro products and demonstrate those capabilities to them, advise them on server architectures, and share best practices for doing data science in R and Python using those products.
  
  
• Responsibility for providing the voice of the customer to other teams at Posit, especially product management and product engineering.
  
  
• A variety of projects that might include
  
  
• writing and maintaining documentation, how-to articles, and demos of our products.
  
  
• working on our internal data science infrastructure – picking up the newest in our Pro Products and preparing them to show to customers.
  
  
• exploring enhancements and integrations for our Pro and Open Source products, and helping the product teams incorporate what you’ve learned.
  
  
• creating and delivering public webinars, talks, and workshops.

What you’ll help with:

• Driving technology partner collaboration with cloud data providers like Databricks and Snowflake to improve product experience for customers and the co-selling experience for account teams.
  
  
• Improving our team’s processes and tools so our workflows facilitate us doing great work, taking adequate focus time, and having time off to rest and recharge.
  
  
• Setting the direction of our products by influencing the product management and engineering teams.
  
  

You will learn...

So much.

No Solutions Advisor has ever (or ever will) start knowing everything we do. Strong candidates for this role generally have prior experience with most of the things below and have a strong interest in the rest.

• How to navigate deeply technical pre-sales customer calls. Even people with substantial customer experience find that Solutions Advising at Posit demands new depths of empathy, curiosity, and clarity of thinking and explanation.
  
  
• How data scientists work.  There is a lot of variety in this ecosystem.  You will help customers understand how our tools fit into their current workflows and support the business outcomes they are tasked with.  Each industry has its own flavor of regulation and requirements when it comes to code-first analytics.
  
  
• How to speak fluently about enterprise infrastructure. Solutions Advisors help our customers IT/Admins determine the best product architecture, which requires they speak knowledgeably about integrations to other data (science) tools and platforms, and how to get things done on Linux servers including system administration, authentication, networking, and containerization.
  
  
• How Posit’s Pro Products work. On customer calls, you will be the expert on our Pro Products – explaining how to install and configure them, as well as how they help make life better for data scientists.

What to expect:

Within 1 month, you’ll…

• Meet the rest of the SA team and start meeting Sales, Customer Success, and other nearby team members.
  
  
• Configure Posit’s Pro Products for yourself to start learning the ins and outs.
  
  
• Have joined dozens of demo calls with data scientists and IT architecture calls with IT/Admins of Posit’s Pro products.

Within 3 months, you’ll...

• Meet a large fraction of the company across Solutions Engineering, Sales, CS, Support, Marketing, Engineering, and more.
  
  
• Lead technical discovery, product demo, and architecture calls solo, helping our customers evaluate Posit’s Pro products.
  
  
• Begin getting involved with customers who are evaluating our products, guiding them through proofs of concept installations of their trial environments.

Within 12 months, you’ll…

• Contribute to projects in roles of escalating size and scope.
  
  
• Take on larger, more strategic, and higher-touch engagements with customers and partners.