Area Vice President, Sales Engineering

The Area Vice President, Sales Engineering — EMEA is a transformational executive role responsible for building, leading, and scaling DDN’s most critical customer-facing technical organization across the EMEA region. This leader sets the vision and standard for Sales Engineering excellence, drives a culture of accountability and continuous development, and partners at the highest levels of Sales, Product, Marketing, and Engineering to align technical strategy with business outcomes.

The AVP SE is not just a manager of managers — this is an organizational architect. The right candidate will be a people-first leader who attracts exceptional talent, retains and grows the team already in place, and transforms how Sales Engineering operates at DDN: from metrics and KPIs to culture, coaching, and cross-functional influence. This leader will be accountable for region-wide technical execution across enterprise, Higher Education, Federal, HPC, and regulated-industry customers.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Executive Leadership & Organizational Strategy

• Own the vision, strategy, and execution of DDN’s Sales Engineering function across the EMEA region, spanning multiple sub-regions and market segments.

• Lead through an active organizational and cultural transformation — setting a new standard for how the SE team operates, collaborates, and delivers.

• Define and enforce a culture of accountability, where commitments are clear, performance is measured, and outcomes are owned at every level of the team.

• Build a team-oriented environment that values collaboration over individual heroics, and where every SE understands how their work contributes to shared revenue and customer success goals.

• Model and reinforce a positive, high-performance culture that people want to join and stay a part of.

Talent: Attract, Retain & Develop

• Develop and execute a recruiting strategy that consistently attracts top-tier Sales Engineering talent across the EMEA region— building DDN’s reputation as a destination for great technical leaders.

• Retain and invest in the current team: identify high-potential individuals, build personalized development plans, and create visible career pathways within the SE organization.

• Lead a structured onboarding and enablement program that accelerates time-to-productivity for new hires.

• Conduct regular 1:1s, coaching sessions, and performance reviews that are substantive, forward-looking, and developmental — not administrative.

• Champion internal mobility and promotion from within as a primary talent strategy.

KPIs, Metrics & Operational Rigor

• Design and implement a comprehensive KPI framework for the EMEA SE organization, covering technical win rates, POC conversion, deal cycle contribution, customer satisfaction, and team productivity.

• Establish regular operating cadences — weekly team reviews, monthly business reviews, quarterly planning — that keep the organization aligned, informed, and accountable.

• Build dashboards and reporting mechanisms that give Sales and executive leadership real-time visibility into SE performance across the region.

• Drive continuous improvement by analyzing performance data, identifying gaps, and executing corrective initiatives with clear ownership and timelines.

• Ensure initiatives are executed fully and measured rigorously — from launch through adoption and outcome verification.

Cross-Functional Leadership & Influence

• Serve as the primary executive bridge between Sales Engineering and Sales, Product Management, Engineering, Marketing, and Professional Services — communicating clearly and influencing effectively at all levels.

• Act as the authoritative voice of the EMEA field to Product and Engineering: translating customer and competitive intelligence into actionable roadmap input.

• Partner with Sales leadership on pipeline strategy, deal qualification, and forecast accuracy — ensuring SE resources are aligned to highest-value opportunities.

• Drive alignment between SE, Professional Services, and Support to ensure seamless customer experience from pre-sales through deployment and expansion.

• Represent DDN Sales Engineering at executive customer briefings, strategic partner events, and industry forums.

Technical Execution & Customer Engagement

• Ensure consistent, high-quality technical execution across all customer segments in the EMEA— from early discovery through POC, architecture review, and technical close.

• Serve as an executive technical sponsor for DDN’s most strategic accounts and high-stakes competitive situations.

• Establish and enforce architectural standards, technical messaging, and solution positioning frameworks across the SE team.

• Guide the team in articulating DDN’s differentiation in AI data storage, EXAScaler, Infinia, and high-performance infrastructure environments.

• Own the quality and consistency of technical deliverables: POC results, architecture documents, RFP responses, and executive presentations.

Leading Organizational & Cultural Transformation

• Drive a deliberate transformation of the EMEA SE organization — evolving from a reactive, deal-support function to a proactive, strategic, value-creating team.

• Build and institutionalize new operating models, playbooks, and processes that scale with DDN’s growth without sacrificing agility.

• Create psychological safety and trust within the team so that people feel empowered to take initiative, raise issues, and challenge the status quo constructively.

• Lead change with clarity and empathy — communicating the “why” behind organizational decisions, and bringing the team along rather than mandating from above.

• Build a culture where feedback flows freely in all directions — from team to leader, leader to team, and peer to peer.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS

• 15+ years of experience in Sales Engineering, Solutions Architecture, or Systems Engineering, with a minimum of 7 years in senior people leadership roles managing managers.

• Demonstrated ability to lead and transform a distributed, multi-layered technical organization at a regional or global scale.

• Proven track record of designing and implementing KPI frameworks and operational metrics that drive measurable improvement in SE performance.

• Demonstrated success attracting exceptional talent to a team and retaining key contributors through intentional career development and culture-building.

• Experience leading an organization through significant cultural or structural transformation, with tangible, sustainable results.

• Strong cross-functional executive communication skills: equally effective in a board-level briefing, a product strategy session, and a 1:1 coaching conversation.

• Deep background in enterprise storage, data infrastructure, AI/ML infrastructure, HPC, or distributed systems.

• Proven ability to drive accountability without micromanagement — empowering teams while maintaining clear expectations and follow-through.

• Experience building team-oriented cultures where collaboration is the default and individual contributors feel supported, not siloed.

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Experience at the VP or equivalent level leading SE organizations at $200M+ revenue technology companies.

• Direct experience with DDN’s core markets: NeoCloud providers, AI training infrastructure, HPC, financial services, life sciences, or federal/government.

• Familiarity with modern AI data infrastructure ecosystems: GPU clusters, parallel file systems, object storage, and MLOps pipelines.

• Track record of scaling SE teams and operating models in high-growth, rapidly evolving technology environments.

• Experience establishing SE Center of Excellence practices: demo environments, reference architectures, reusable technical assets, and enablement curricula.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field (or equivalent experience). MBA or advanced degree a plus.

WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE

Within the first 12 months, the AVP SE — EMEA will have:

• Established a clear KPI framework and operating cadence adopted across the full EMEA SE organization.

• Completed a talent assessment of the current team and executed a development and retention plan for key contributors.

• Recruited at least two senior hires who materially strengthen the team’s capabilities or coverage.

• Driven a measurable improvement in technical win rate, POC conversion, or deal velocity in at least two of DDN’s EMEA segments.

• Built visible, trusted relationships with Sales, Product, and Engineering leadership that enable faster, better decisions.

• Defined the roadmap for the next phase of SE organizational evolution and gained executive alignment on it.

WHY DDN

• Shape the technical go-to-market strategy of a global leader in AI data storage at an inflection point of growth.

• Lead an organization that sits at the center of DDN’s most important customer relationships and revenue outcomes.

• Build and transform a team with the full support of executive leadership committed to investing in people and culture.

• Partner with world-class sales, product, and engineering executives on some of the most technically demanding and commercially significant deals in the industry.

• Competitive compensation package including base salary, variable incentive, equity, and comprehensive benefits.