Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer, Higher Education (IN/MI)

The role

You will be the technical lead for Higher Education accounts, focusing on R1 research universities. You will build technical and financial solutions, support research workloads, and translate technology to institutional outcomes.

What you will do

• Develop understanding of institution research priorities and funding cycles
• Connect technology to measurable research and institutional outcomes
• Adapt conversations for audiences including principal investigators, CIOs, and procurement
• Build business cases including total cost of ownership and data center footprint
• Support research workloads from instrument output through HPC and AI pipelines
• Help customers with data management, lifecycle, and security requirements
• Partner with account managers, specialists, and channel partners
• Take ownership of evaluations, benchmarks, and proofs of concept
• Capture requirements and translate them into solutions
• Author responses to RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs

Required qualifications

• 8 or more years of relevant experience across technology, solution design, and customer-facing communication
• Pre-sales or customer-facing technical experience
• Experience with higher education, research computing, academic medical centers, or the public sector
• Familiarity with HPC and AI environments: parallel and distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, schedulers such as Slurm, and data pipelines for genomics, imaging, or simulation
• Broad technical depth across two or more of: cloud, HPC, AI and machine learning infrastructure, data management, core infrastructure, analytics, or financial and business applications
• A track record of selling on value
• Ability to hold credible conversations with engineers, architects, executives, data scientists, researchers, finance teams, and procurement
• Comfort with ambiguity
• Curiosity, empathy, an open mind, and a genuine appetite for continuous learning
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• BS in CS, EE, another technical degree, or equivalent experience

Nice to have

• Knowledge of current and emerging storage architectures (FC, iSCSI, NAS, SAN, object) and file systems
• Linux, NFS, and distributed Linux environments
• VMware, Ethernet, TCP/IP, and general networking
• AWS, Azure, or GCP, and hybrid or cloud-native architectures
• Containers, Kubernetes, and microservices
• Data-intensive applications such as structured databases (SQL, Oracle) and analytics platforms
• Experience with grant-funded procurement, consortium purchasing, or public sector contract vehicles
• Experience with higher education, research computing, academic medical centers
• Familiarity with HPC, research and AI environments: parallel and distributed file systems, GPU-attached storage, schedulers such as Slurm, and data pipelines for genomics, imaging, or simulation

Benefits

• Flexible time off
• Wellness resources
• Company-sponsored team events

Before you apply

• Applications are accepted on an ongoing basis until the job is filled

About the company

Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) is a data platform company that closed fiscal 2026 with $3.7 billion in revenue.