Presales Storage Backup Architect - Unstructured Data & Hybrid Cloud

We are seeking an experienced Storage Solutions Architect who combines broad enterprise storage expertise with deep knowledge of backup, recovery, and high-performance backup target design. This is a highly visible, customer-facing role focused on helping customers modernize backup infrastructure, reduce recovery risk, and architect fast-recovery solutions using HPE Alletra Storage MP X10000 (X10K) in partnership with leading backup software platforms. The ideal candidate understands how backup administrators operate, can translate backup policies and operational requirements into a defensible storage design, and has repeatedly sized backup targets using real-world capacity, data reduction, performance, retention, and growth assumptions.

This remains a broad Storage Solutions Architect role, with responsibility for enterprise file and object storage discussions as needed; however, its primary specialization is the fast recovery and backup use case. The Aarchitect will serve as a trusted technical advisor to customers, account teams, partners, product management, and engineering throughout discovery, sizing, solution validation, competitive positioning, and deployment planning.

Role Overview:

As a Backup Storage Architect - Unstructured Data & Hybrid Cloud, you will:

• Partner directly with customers and backup administrators to assess current backup environments, identify recovery gaps, and design scalable storage architectures that improve backup and restore performance.

• Size backup storage targets using protected front-end capacity, daily change rate, retention, annual growth, backup method and frequency, concurrent streams, replication or secondary copies, recovery objectives, expected data reduction, and required capacity headroom.

• Translate Commvault, Veeam, Cohesity, and related backup configurations into storage capacity, throughput, networking, resilience, and operational requirements.

• Evaluate deduplication and compression behavior by workload type and explain how source-side encryption, pre-compression, backup format, block size, change patterns, database maintenance, and retention policies can affect achievable data reduction and system sizing.

• Lead customer workshops, assessments, and proofs of concept that validate backup ingest, restore throughput, concurrency, capacity efficiency, resiliency, and end-to-end recovery workflows.

• Provide strong competitive expertise on Dell EMC Data Domain and other enterprise backup targets, including their architecture, sizing methods, data reduction approaches, performance characteristics, strengths, and tradeoffs.

• Collaborate closely with sales, channel partners, services, product management, and engineering to shape solutions, capture requirements, influence roadmap priorities, and ensure a high-quality customer experience.

• Maintain broad knowledge of enterprise object and file storage so the fast-recovery architecture can be positioned within the customer’s wider unstructured data and hybrid cloud strategy.

• Travel as needed to support strategic customers, partners, proofs of concept, and internal teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and document enterprise backup and fast-recovery solutions centered on X10K, including physical topology, capacity, networking, performance assumptions, availability, security, immutability, and operational integration.

• Conduct structured discovery and validate source data from backup reports, capacity tools, job histories, retention schedules, and customer interviews before finalizing a design.

• Build transparent sizing models that clearly identify assumptions, expected data reduction ranges, growth projections, usable-capacity requirements, headroom, risks, and sensitivity to missing or uncertain inputs.

• Understand and account for full, incremental, synthetic full, forever-incremental, GFS, auxiliary copy, replication, archive, and long-term retention strategies when designing the target platform.

• Lead technical validation and POCs with measurable success criteria for backup throughput, restore speed, concurrent workloads, recovery time objectives, failover behavior, and integration with supported backup applications.

• Help customers troubleshoot performance or capacity issues across the backup software, media or proxy layer, network, storage target, source workload, and data reduction path.

• Present solution recommendations and tradeoffs to backup administrators, infrastructure architects, security teams, procurement stakeholders, and executive audiences.

• Support RFIs, RFPs, competitive takeouts, business cases, and solution justification with accurate technical content and defensible sizing assumptions.

• Create reusable sizing guidance, discovery checklists, reference architectures, competitive material, and field enablement that improve consistency and quality across the broader presales organization.

• Remain current on backup and recovery trends, ransomware-resilient architectures, immutable storage, cyber-recovery practices, cloud integration, and the evolving backup software ecosystem.

• 8+ years of hands-on experience designing, sizing, and positioning enterprise storage solutions, with substantial customer-facing presales, consulting, or solution architecture experience.

• Demonstrated experience sizing storage targets for backup and recovery, including the ability to work from incomplete customer data, identify missing inputs, document assumptions, and quantify sizing risk.

• Deep practical understanding of backup administration, including backup windows, recovery workflows, RPO and RTO, retention, full and incremental strategies, copy policies, replication, immutability, and operational recovery testing.

• Strong knowledge of deduplication and compression, including the difference between front-end protected capacity, stored capacity, logical capacity, effective capacity, and net data reduction.

• Experience with at least two of the following backup platforms and the ability to become fluent across all three: Commvault, Veeam, and Cohesity.

• Hands-on experience with Dell EMC Data Domain, including DD Boost concepts, capacity and performance sizing, data reduction expectations, and competitive positioning.

• Working knowledge of enterprise object and file storage, including S3, NFS, and SMB, and an understanding of how protocol, network, and workload behavior affect performance and scale.

• Demonstrated experience planning, executing, and documenting customer POCs and performance validations.

• Excellent discovery, analytical, troubleshooting, communication, presentation, and executive-facing skills.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.

Platform Experience:

• Commvault, including MediaAgent and storage policy concepts, deduplication databases, synthetic full backups, auxiliary copies, retention, and capacity reporting.

• Veeam, including proxies, repositories, scale-out backup repositories, active and synthetic full backups, GFS retention, immutability, and restore workflows.

• Cohesity DataProtect or comparable scale-out backup platforms, including policy-based protection, data reduction, replication, recovery, and operational administration.

• Dell EMC Data Domain and DD Boost; experience with HPE StoreOnce/Catalyst, ExaGrid, Pure Storage, NetApp, or other enterprise backup targets is a strong plus.

• Common protected environments such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Kubernetes, Windows and Linux file systems, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle RMAN, SAP, NAS, and cloud-native workloads.

United States of America: Annual Salary USD 183,000 - 355,000 in Massachusetts // 161,000 - 378,000 in Illinois & North Carolina & Pennsylvania & Texas This range reflects the minimum to maximum combined base and target-level sales compensation that would be paid if the hire performs at 100% of their sales plan. Of that on-target pay amount, the mix of base salary and target-level sales compensation is 80%/20%.”

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud company advancing the way people live and work. We help companies connect, protect, analyze, and act on their data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so they can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world. Our culture thrives on finding new and better ways to accelerate what’s next. We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good. If you are looking to stretch and grow your career our culture will embrace you. Open up opportunities with HPE.