Senior Solutions Advisor

About the Team

Posit’s Solutions Engineering team (Sol-Eng/SE) aims to reduce the distance between the customers of our Professional Products and our Pro and Open Source offerings.

We help our customers – especially their IT/SysAdmin teams – understand, evaluate, configure, and use our professional products. We aim to bring curiosity and empathy to every customer engagement, learning about the pain the customer experiences trying to get value from Open-Source Data Science.

But that’s only half the job.

As we learn about what customers want and need, we use that knowledge to improve our products, documentation, and sales processes.

We currently are a team of 18, and expect to grow this year.

On Sol-Eng, you’ll play an important role in both empowering individual customers and making Posit and our products work better in the future.

People who thrive in this role tend to:

• Find joy in working directly with customers and prospects in sales cycles.  This role is pre-sales focused and at least 50% customer-facing.
• Have some exposure to data science. Many people on the team are ex-data scientists, and you’ll spend a lot of time talking to customers about data science workflows and use cases. It’s worth noting that you won’t be doing data science or writing code daily.
• Be interested in the server infrastructure and architecture that underlies enterprise data science. Most of our conversations with customers are with IT teams and System Administrators. Many SEs arrive at Posit with limited exposure to these things but have some demonstrated interest (for example, maybe you’ve run your own RStudio or Shiny server, become an accidental DBA, or become the go-to person for help with Docker containers).
• Be hungry and humble. Sol-Eng covers an impossibly broad technical scope. Great SEs quickly admit what they don’t know and constantly seek to learn more.
• Find excitement in having many demands on your time, rather than overwhelm. The SE team has close relationships with almost every other team at Posit. There’s no limit to the different projects SEs could take on, being able to choose important things (with help and guidance from managers) and ignore distractions is a key skill for a Posit SE.

What you’ll own own:

• Technical pre-sales calls where you’ll learn what prospective customers want from Posit’s Pro products and demonstrate those capabilities to them, advise them on server architectures, and share best practices for doing data science in R and Python using those products.
• Responsibility for providing the voice of the customer to other teams at Posit, especially product management and product engineering.
• A variety of projects that might include
• writing and maintaining documentation, how-to articles, and demos of our products.
• working on our internal data science infrastructure – picking up the newest in our Pro Products and preparing them to show to customers.
• exploring enhancements and integrations for our Pro and Open Source products, and helping the product teams incorporate what you’ve learned.
• creating and delivering public webinars, talks, and workshops.

What you’ll help with:

• Improving our team’s processes so our workflows facilitate us doing great work, taking adequate focus time, and having time off to rest and recharge.
• Driving technology partner collaboration with cloud data providers like Databricks and Snowflake to improve product experience for customers and the co-selling experience for account teams.
• Setting the direction of our products by influencing the product management and engineering teams.

You will learn...

So much.

No one has ever (or ever will) start on Sol-Eng knowing everything we do. Strong candidates for this role generally have prior experience with approximately half of the things below.

• How to navigate deeply technical pre-sales customer calls. Even people with substantial customer experience find that Sol-Eng demands new depths of empathy, curiosity, and clarity of thinking and explanation.
• How Posit’s Pro Products work. On customer calls, you will be the expert on our Pro Products – explaining how to install and configure them, as well as how they help make life better for data scientists.
• How to speak fluently about enterprise infrastructure. Solutions Engineers help our customers IT/Admins determine the best product architecture, which requires they speak knowledgeably about integrations to other data (science) tools and platforms, and how to get things done on Linux servers including system administration, authentication, networking, and containerization.

What to expect:

Within 1 month, you’ll…

• Meet the rest of the Sol-Eng team and start meeting Sales, Customer Success, and other nearby team members.
• Configure Posit’s Pro Products for yourself to start learning the ins and outs.
• Have joined dozens of demo calls with data scientists and IT architecture calls with IT/Admins of Posit’s Pro products.

Within 3 months, you’ll...

• Meet a large fraction of the company across Sol-Eng, Sales, CS, Support, Marketing, Engineering, and more.
• Lead technical discovery, product demo, and architecture calls solo, helping our customers evaluate Posit’s Pro products.
• Begin getting hands on with customers who are installing our products, looking over their shoulders and suggesting how to set up and configure their environments.

Within 12 months, you’ll…

• Contribute to projects in roles of escalating size and scope.
• Take on larger, more strategic, and higher-touch engagements with customers and partners.