Principal Solutions Engineer, Japan

Team
You will be a member of the Japan team, and dealing with Japanese and Korean customers and partners. Working closely with APJ team members, and leveraging the product and engineering team to provide the best solution for customers.

Role
As a Solutions Engineer, you will drive the key part of the sales process and the success of our customers by providing technical expertise, solution guidance, and onboarding support. Your primary scope will be establishing our business foundation and building an ecosystem through field awareness with partners.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to customers and partners, understanding their business objectives, technical requirements, and challenges to propose tailored solutions utilizing YugabyteDB.
• Conduct product demonstrations, proof-of-concepts (POCs), and technical presentations to showcase the value proposition and capabilities of YugabyteDB.
• Collaborate with the sales team to understand customer needs, craft compelling solution proposals, and support the development of sales strategies.
• Develop and maintain deep technical expertise in YugabyteDB, including its architecture, features, deployment best practices, and integration with related technologies.
• Work closely with customers to design, architect, and implement YugabyteDB solutions that meet their performance, scalability, and reliability requirements.
• Provide hands-on technical support, troubleshooting assistance, and guidance to customers during pre-sales evaluations, deployment, and potentially post-sales activities.
• Continuously gather feedback from customers and relay it to the product and engineering teams to drive product enhancements and improvements.
• Contribute to the creation of technical documentation, knowledge base articles, blogs, demos and other educational materials to support customer enablement and self-service.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. A Master's degree is a plus.
• Proven experience (3+ years) in a technical pre-sales or solutions engineering role, preferably in the database or distributed systems space.
• Demonstrated ability to work independently, manage multiple priorities, and thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Strong understanding of database technologies, SQL, NoSQL, and distributed systems concepts.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and familiarity with cloud services providers' offerings and capabilities, including infrastructure as code, serverless computing, and managed services.  Understanding of cloud architecture frameworks such as AWS Well-Architected Framework, Azure Well-Architected Framework, or Google Cloud Architecture Framework is a plus.
• Knowledge of Kubernetes and containerization technologies, with experience in deploying and managing containerized applications is a plus. 
• Excellent verbal and written communication, and presentation skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience working in a startup, demonstrating adaptability, resilience, and the ability to thrive in dynamic environments.
• Willingness to travel occasionally for customer meetings, conferences, and industry events.

Nice to have

• Knowledge of the distributed relational databases market (e.g.Amazon Aurora,  Google Spanner)
• Knowledge of Apache Cassandra 
• An understanding of the options and limitations of how traditional databases can be scaled for high throughput
• An understanding of the options and limitations of traditional database HA and resilience mechanisms.