Director, Solutions Engineering APAC

Director of Solutions Engineering, APAC

Job description:

The Couchbase Director of Solutions Engineering, APAC leads a pre-sales engineering team through all sales engagements and is responsible for activities and goals of Sales Engineering across APAC.   

The position works closely with their direct reports, Regional Sales Leaders, and territorybased Enterprise Sales Representatives to qualify prospective clients for Couchbase products and services across APAC. Our Solutions Engineers are the primary technical field experts, responsible for actively driving and managing the technical part of a sales engagement. 

The Director of Solutions Engineering will provide guidance/mentoring to Solutions

Engineers. The role requires a high degree of organization as it involves managing a team of Solutions Engineers and multiple opportunities at once. In this exciting role, you will become an expert explaining NoSQL, Cloud and AI advantages and how it can be used to solve the customer’s problems; all with a good dose of getting customers excited about using this new approach for fast & scalable databases. 

The Director of Solutions Engineering is responsible for owning or guiding their team through the POC, RFI and/or RFP processes. The role will interface with many different types of Enterprise customers and their management teams. Ensuring the advancement of Solutions Engineers in their skills and knowledge to effectively compete in a global marketplace is an important aspect of this role. Additionally, a proven track record of success and demonstrated ability to effectively engage with sales teams are also key. 

Management responsibilities:

• Hire and lead a world-class team focused on delivering a unique, differentiated customer experience
• Responsibility to cover the APAC Region
• Identify technical and soft skill training needs, perform assessments, and provide feedback to direct reports. Handle escalations and address conflicts
• Grow capability of overall team to deliver training and consulting to customers to grow their product adoption
• Partner with the team to evaluate new technical solutions to meet or exceed prospect and customer requirements
• Build development plans for team members to ensure successful on-boarding and continuing education of the team
• Balance the workload of the Solutions Engineering team in concert with input from the Enterprise Sales Executive and Regional Sales Leaders
• Mentor Solutions Engineering teams by providing hands-on technical guidance for building solutions such as Cloud, AI , NoSQL for pre-sales engagements
• Support and participate with the Solutions Engineers in performing advanced technical presentations for customers, and prospects, remotely and in-person
• Establish, track, monitor and report on actionable metrics and KPIs for product adoption
• Represent Couchbase at conferences, industry, and sales events
• Ability to teach other members of the team and effectively manage a team of highly skilled Sales Engineers
• Proven ability to provide technical leadership to the account team and engineers
• Hands-on administration and troubleshooting experience
• Familiarity with NoSQL databases or other distributed high-performance systems
• Must be able to coordinate across various groups and functional teams
• Ability to apply solutions, technology, and products to a business opportunity
• Excellent communication and presentation skills with an ability to present technical solutions concisely to any audience
• Demonstrated passion for diving into technical issues and solving customer problems
• Demonstrated critical thinking and advanced troubleshooting skills and qualities

Proven Skills:

• 7+ years of experience serving in the capacity of a pre-sales engineer and a minimum of 2+ years in a Presales Management role with a proven track record of success
• Demonstrate to customers how to solve their problems and meet their requirements with Couchbase Server and get them excited about NoSQL database technology
• Develop and maintain an expert understanding of all Couchbase products and services. Establish and continuously update best practices for technical customer engagements in the fast-paced world of NoSQL
• Work closely with the sales team on account strategy and identifying additional opportunities in existing accounts including strategizing digital transformation initiatives for customers
• Ensure the success of customer POC / Pilots through effective management of acceptance criteria and issue escalation/resolution
• Develop and deliver exceptional company/product presentations and demonstrations to manage, and maintain strong relationships with key customers
• Work with all technical levels from managers, architects and developers and explain Couchbase Server and its uses
• Be the technical product expert for customers and stay up to date on the NoSQL competitive landscape
• Work with Product Management and Engineering to provide feedback from the field and represent the customer perspective as well as identify and write internal and external technical collateral
• Experience engaging with developers and programming experience in at least one of the following: Java/.NET/PHP