Senior Solutions Engineer (Post-Sales)

Posit's mission is to create free and open-source software for data science, scientific research, and technical communication to enhance the production and consumption of knowledge by everyone, regardless of economic means. We are a different kind of software company, and we’re proud to build and sell products that help people understand and improve the world through data.

About the Team

Posit’s Solutions Engineering (Sol-Eng) team aims to reduce the distance between customers of our professional products and open source offerings. 

We help our customers – especially their IT/SysAdmin teams – deploy, install, configure, and use our professional products. We aim to bring curiosity and empathy to every customer engagement, leaning into the customer experiences as they seek 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 processes.

On Sol-Eng, you’ll play an essential role in both unblocking and empowering 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 and unblocking customers. This role is customer-facing. 
• Love learning and sharing your knowledge of the server infrastructure and architecture that underlies enterprise data science. You’ll be an advisor to IT teams who administer Posit’s products in a wide variety of architectures and with a range of integrations. You have exposure to some of these topics and technologies (e.g. cloud services, Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, Slurm, authentication, connecting to data sources) and look forward to opportunities to dive deeply and learn in other areas. Knowing all of these topics on Day 1 is not required, but having interest in learning more about how they work is fundamental to the job.
• Be curious about data science workflows and use cases. We make tools to multiply the impact of Data Scientists who work in open source. You won’t be doing data science or writing code, but you’ll need to understand what a Data Scientist does (e.g., exploratory data analysis, modeling, reporting, app development). . Prior experience specifically with data science or our professional products is not necessary, but may be helpful.
• Be hungry and humble. Sol-Eng covers an impossibly broad technical scope.. Great Sol-Eng team members are quick to admit what they don’t know and constantly seek to learn more. As a trusted advisor to customers, your credibility comes from being honest about the limits of your knowledge and following through to close the gaps.
• Find excitement in having many demands on your time, rather than overwhelm. The Sol-Eng team has close relationships with almost every other team at Posit. There’s no limit to the different projects Sol-Eng 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 Solutions Engineer.

What you’ll own own:

• Serving as a proactive, ongoing technical advisor to customers discussing server configurations and architectures, supporting technical strategy planning, and sharing best practices for doing open source data science at scale with Posit’s professional products. You’ll collaborate with sales and customer success to enable the customer to realize the full value of their Posit environment. 
• Scaling our reach through webinars, talks, workshops, documentation, automation, and how-tos that help customers adopt Posit products.
• Leading scoped, project-based implementation work, from onboarding through delivery of defined outcomes.
• Providing the voice of the customer to other teams at Posit, especially Product Management and Product Engineering.

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.
• 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 post-sales customer calls and have the ability to speak about technical topics to internal and external audiences of different levels. 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 for them, 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 virtualization.

What to expect:

Within 1 month, you’ll…

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

Within 3 months, you’ll...

• Lead customer calls, helping our customers determine how Posit’s Pro products fit into their existing data and technology stacks. You won’t need to know all the answers, but you will lead with curiosity to build the right mental models that will allow you to go back to find answers.
• Be comfortable discussing general architectures and deployment patterns for our product
• Begin getting hands on with customers who are installing and maintaining 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 customer engagements that might include weekly meetings with the same customer.