AI & Cloud Platforms Specialist Solutions Engineer

Drives demand and revenue for AI, cloud, data, platform engineering, DevOps, and modern application services. Engages customers, qualifies opportunities, explains architectures, conducts workshops and demonstrations, develops solutions, builds executive relationships, manages territories and forecasts, and supports deal closure. Collaborates with account teams, cloud vendors, partners, marketing, and delivery teams while maintaining foundational certifications across AWS and Azure. The summary above was generated by AI AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together advances in cloud infrastructure, automation and analytics, and software delivery, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation. At AHEAD, we prioritize creating a culture of belonging, where all perspectives and voices are represented, valued, respected, and heard. We create spaces to empower everyone to speak up, make change, and drive the culture at AHEAD. We are an equal opportunity employer, and do not discriminate based on an individual’s race, national origin, color, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, religion, age, disability, marital status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law, whether actual or perceived. We embrace all candidates that will contribute to the diversification and enrichment of ideas and perspectives at AHEAD. The Specialist Solutions Engineer in the AI & Cloud Platforms practice will be a core member of our Cloud, Apps, Data, and AI pursuit team that’s responsible for generating demand across the AI & Cloud Platforms portfolio. This includes Data Products and Services, AI Services and Infrastructure, Cloud Modernization and Migration, Platform Engineering and Automation, as well as Modern Application Development. Specialists are technical experts that collaborate with our AHEAD Account Teams to help identify, qualify, and build the solutions that support our customers Digital Business. They listen to customer challenges and demonstrate credibility through success stories, whiteboarding sessions, and knowledge of the industry. The responsibilities will include working closely with the Regional Managing Directors to drive sales campaigns focused on our portfolio of AI & Cloud Platform consulting services. This individual will also be responsible for creating awareness of AHEAD’s world class services that integrate with our key partners, AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Harness, Cognition, Kong, Red Hat, Wiz, Snowflake, and Databricks, while working closely with current and prospective customers to determine how AHEAD can best serve their Modernization and Digital Transformation initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Engages in conversations with customers to understand their business challenges and introduce AHEAD and AHEAD’s AI & Cloud Platforms capabilities to qualify opportunities.
• Initiates conversations with customers specifically focused around Data, AI, Platform Engineering, Cloud, and Modern Applications in collaboration with vendors and the AHEAD services organization.
• Identify gaps in the client environment, process, and skills with the intent to address, educate, and bring their teams together to drive client enablement
• Explain and educate complex solutions, architectures ,and integrations in a clear and articulate manner
• Creates guiding examples of customer transformation through seminars, workshops, webinars, and direct engagement.
• Collaborates with team members to discover new opportunities. Drives incremental revenue growth through personal campaigns (e.g., portfolio analysis) or internal sources (e.g., Marketing). Collaborates with account teams, partners, or services to track and qualify new opportunities.
• Identifies customer business needs and technology readiness. Contributes to the development of solutions in collaboration with internal teams, partners, and services. Proposes prioritized solutions that align with customers’ needs. Articulates the business value of proposed solutions.
• Collaborates with other teams (e.g., account teams) to build pipeline. Interfaces with customers and builds relationships via social selling. Apply AHEAD’s sales process to adequately qualify an opportunity.
• Identifies opportunities to drive consumption and grow business with existing customers by initiating conversations, providing demos or quotes, and collaborating with partners or internal teams.
• Proactively engage with Cloud vendors to leverage funding mechanisms available as part of sales campaign.
• Proactively builds external stakeholders’ mapping. Collaborates with account teams (e.g., Account Executives) to identify and engage senior business subject matter decision makers at the customer’s/partner’s business.
• Implements strategies to accelerate the closing of deals. Contributes input on strategies to drive and close prioritized opportunities. Implements close plans (e.g., how to map timeline, engage the customer, get customer buy-in and commitment) to de-risk and drive predictable deal closure.

Technical Expertise

• Leads conversations and sets up events within Microsoft, AWS, Harness, Kong, Cognitions, Red Hat, Snowflake, Databricks and other partners.
• Initiates conversations with prospective customers/partners at events to expand external network.
• Proactively provides analysis of the competitive landscape in supported solution area. Evaluates opportunities and makes recommendations on pursuit or withdrawal. Provide the holistic value of Ahead to customers as it pertains to the Modern Apps, Data, DevOps, and Cloud Platforms.
• Maintain a 101 level competency and certification level in core technology areas across AWS (AWS SA Associate Certification) & Microsoft Azure (e.g. AZ-104 Azure Administrator)

Sales Excellence

• Collaborates with partners and resources and leverages customer insights or industry knowledge. Contributes to exploring business and emerging opportunities to optimize the portfolio and support customer innovation.
• Reviews feedback report and coaches others on ensuring customer/partner satisfaction and decreasing dissatisfaction by establishing recovery action plans to improve clients’ overall experience. Manages and/or orchestrates sales and delivery success through the account team and pursuit team.
• Engages with internal and external stakeholders on business planning.
• Collaborates with extended sales team, partners, and marketing to conduct business analysis (e.g., whitespace analysis, identify industry trends) to pursue high-potential customers and develop a target list of potential business.
• Manages the end-to-end business of the assigned territory. Conducts forecasting for accounts and develops a portfolio and territory plan to drive intentional selling aligned with strategic priorities.
• Completes required training and obtains relevant product and role certifications aligned to the role and workload/industry.

• Bachelor-level degree in engineering, IT, data communications, Information Systems, computer science, or equivalent educational or professional experience and/or qualifications
• 7-10 Years Experience in multiple of the following areas:
• Experience with Public Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP) and On-Premises Environments
• Experience with Modern Data Platforms
• Experience with Large Language Models (LLMs) from major providers (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Azure OpenAI & Copilot, Amazon Bedrock & Amazon Nova, Llama-family models)
• Knowledge of generative AI patterns like Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Knowledge of Agentic AI and multi-agent systems
• Hands-on experience in Automation, Orchestration and CI/CD pipelines (SCM, Build, Deployment, Code Quality, APM, Monitoring and Reporting tools).
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) experience (E.g. scripting Terraform, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Rundeck, Shell), * Strong interpersonal skills are required. Ability to work effectively with team members, clients and other areas of the IT environment
• Strong written and oral communications
• Excellent problem-solving abilities, strong decision-making skills and make sound judgment decisions.
• Excellent presentation skills.

Ability To

• Work effectively with team members, clients, and other areas of IT
• Handle multiple tasks and be flexible in a fast-paced environment
• Deliver on time

The compensation range indicated in this posting reflects the On-Target Earnings (“OTE”) for this role, which includes a base salary and any applicable target bonus amount. This OTE range may vary based on the candidate’s relevant experience, qualifications, and geographic location. Why AHEAD: Through our daily work and internal groups like Moving Women AHEAD and RISE AHEAD, we value and benefit from diversity of people, ideas, experience, and everything in between. We fuel growth by stacking our office with top-notch technologies in a multi-million-dollar lab, by encouraging cross department training and development, sponsoring certifications and credentials for continued learning. USA Employment Benefits include:

• Medical, Dental, and Vision Insurance
• 401(k)
• Paid company holidays
• Paid time off
• Paid parental and caregiver leave
• Plus more! See benefits https://www.aheadbenefits.com/ for additional details. Use of AI: We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, assessing responses, or to capture recordings and create transcriptions or summaries during interviews. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans., Remote or Hybrid Chatsworth Lake Manor, CA, USA 37K-66K Hourly Senior level 37K-66K Hourly Senior level Fintech * Financial Services Manages and grows relationships with affluent consumer and business customers through proactive outreach, discovery-based financial guidance, and multi-product solutions. Develops deposits, lending, investment, and banking relationships; manages a book of business; partners with Wealth, Home Lending, and Business Banking; promotes digital adoption; supports branch colleagues; and maintains strong risk, documentation, compliance, and customer service standards. Takeda, 140K-215K Annually Senior level 140K-215K Annually Senior level Cloud * Computer Vision * Information Technology * Sales * Security * Cybersecurity Develop and operate CrowdStrike’s internal cloud management platform and mission-critical CI/CD pipelines. Build APIs and UIs using Go and TypeScript, improve developer productivity, integrate tooling, maintain cloud-native infrastructure, and support secure, highly available software delivery systems. Collaborate with development, infrastructure, security, and SRE teams, ensure SOC2-aware processes, and participate in on-call operations. Top Skills: AlertmanagerArgo CdArgo WorkflowsCi/CdDebianDockerGoGoreleaserGrafanaHelmJavaScriptJenkinsKubernetesKustomizeLinuxPrometheusPulumiPypiTemporalTerraformTypescript

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