Principal Solutions Architect – Pre-Sales Lead, Data Center & AI Infrastructure Networking

Responsibilities

• Acting as the technical lead on pursuits, backing up our Business Development Managers with direction on what to pitch and how to win it.
• Building and maintaining the offering decks, solution collateral, and reference architectures that the rest of the GTM team reuses.
• Defining the client profiles we go after in data-center and AI- infrastructure modernization, and helping qualify the deals that come in.
• Running technical discovery and architecture sessions with clients, alongside the BDM.
• Turning infrastructure problems (latency, throughput, scale, cost) into proposals and SOWs, and supporting the commercial negotiation.
• Owning solution design across datacenter fabric modernization, AI-inference readiness, SmartNIC/DPU offload, Linux networking and packet processing, segmentation and security, and hybrid-cloud networking.
• Guiding hands‑on work across DPDK, VPP, eBPF/XDP, P4, SmartNICs/DPUs, FPGA/GPU offload, SONiC, Kubernetes networking, and Open vSwitch.

Requirements

• 10+ years in datacenter networking, infrastructure, or systems engineering
• A real pre‑sales or solutions architecture track record.
• Hands‑on experience building or selling networking solutions.
• Able to build and present proofs-of-concept, ideally with automation tooling (Python, Ansible, Terraform)
• Strong working knowledge of several of: Linux networking, switching, and routing, SmartNIC/DPU, DPDK/VPP, FPGA acceleration, SDN data planes, Kubernetes networking, network security, virtualization, observability, and AI-infrastructure networking.
• Comfort with enterprise procurement and long technical sales cycles.
• The ability to hold a room of senior buyers (CIO, VP Infrastructure, VP Engineering) and make engineering depth land as business value.
• Fluent English, B2 or above.
• Happy to work flexible hours, including afternoon and evening calls with US clients.