Application Specialist

Position Overview

The best NI Field Application Engineers effectively balance their time between face-to-face interactions with target customers, technical activities, and providing insight and feedback as the voice of the customer. Field Application Engineers serve as highly trusted technical consultants across multiple industries, allowing them to influence the technical direction of target accounts to ensure mutual customer and long-term NI success. They inspire internal NI and customer stakeholders to action through leading and coordinating technical strategy and activities that achieve co-authored technical objectives for top accounts. They stay in tune with industry trends and the NI technology roadmap to recommend approaches for customers’ current and future technical needs. This position is compensated by 80% base salary, and 20% variable pay based on achievement of key sales objectives and account revenue.

Position Location

This position will serve key customers in the Los Angeles, California area.

In this Role, Your Responsibilities Will Be:

NI Field Applications Engineers spend most of their time:

• Building key technical relationships at top accounts by demonstrating great technical credibility that increases customer technical confidence in NI

• Understanding and assisting in creation of customer technical requirements

• Providing recommendations on software and hardware architectures while helping customers understand the test system development process to ensure success

• Collaborating with NI Account Managers as part of an account team to lead development and execution of the account technical strategy which provides better insight to the overall account strategy and opportunity pipeline

• Coordinating with and informing internal stakeholders to execute on account technical initiatives and provide feedback to increase account success

• Leveraging industry, application area, and account knowledge to uncover and influence customer future technical needs and challenges thereby generating further technical demand for NI products, services, and support

Key Performance Objectives

• Achievement of key sales objectives for assigned account(s) tied to generating technical demand, account strategy success, and account(s) annual quota attainment

• Understanding target customers’ business drivers to generate technical demand by collaborating with customers to understand primary business initiatives and direction. Demonstrating a customer-focus mentality through understanding the customer’s known and unknown technical challenges while providing technical guidance that leverages the strengths of the NI platform. A new FAE will learn and align on current challenges and approaches in the first 3 months and be a significant driver for current and future approaches by the end of the first year

• Establishing a cadence and healthy rapport with the NI Account team driving account technical strategy by actively contributing to overall account strategies, assisting with incorporating them into an account plan, executing on customer technical engagements in both pre- and post-sales capacities, coordinating with other technical resources and R&D as additional technical expertise is needed. Within the first 6 months, establish account technical objectives and activities plan with key measures, aligning technical activities with overall account plan enabling you to self-direct your activities to achieve key support objectives and understanding the FAE role in joint engagements with the account team

• Developing strong customer relationships to become a technical trusted advisor by developing a strong technical presence within the account(s) by visiting key technical contacts weekly and building contacts at multiple levels within the account organization. Contacting and/or meeting with existing customers to evaluate open engagements and anticipate future needs. After 12 months clients should view a new FAE as a trusted technical advisor on industry trends and NI platforms.

• Developing and applying industry, application, and NI platform knowledge thereby demonstrating technical expertise in NI software and hardware platforms for your account(s). Developing familiarity with 3rd party and competitors’ products to understand NI platform’s differentiation. Advise customers on the latest industry trends and recommend and implement NI platforms to enable customer success. By the end of the first year, a new FAE is expected to have taken all relevant NI hardware classes and achieved Certified LabVIEW Developer (CLD) and Certified TestStand (CTD) certifications.

Who You Are:

You introduce new ways of looking at problems.  You partner with others to get work done.  You are confident under pressure.