Director Cloud Native Architects, EMEA

THE ROLE

Director, Cloud Native Architects (CNA) EMEA leads and develops a team of CNAs and sets the standard for technical execution, executive engagement, and adoption outcomes across a range of EMEA Enterprise accounts. The role is accountable for building a repeatable operating system that improves deal quality, increases opportunity predictability, and drives measurable revenue impact (ARR/NRR) in partnership with the Theater Sales organisation, Product teams, and regional stakeholders.

Success is reflected across People / Process / Partnership / Product, deliberately prioritised to maximise the Director’s most constrained resource: time.

• People: Building, developing, and inspiring a high-performing team with strong technical credibility and ownership.
• Process: Applying context and rigor in ways that improve focus, decision-making, and execution without creating unnecessary overhead.
• Partnership: Strengthening collaboration with sales, product, and partner stakeholders to improve alignment and shared outcomes.
• Product: Maintaining sufficient product understanding to guide technical decisions, shape meaningful feedback, and support effective field execution.

Scaling model (System Builder): The Director scales impact through a disciplined cadence, clear ownership across a small team, and account-domain expertise, not by attending more internal meetings.

Role Scope

• • Theater: EMEA Enterprise
  • Builds and leads: CNA team pooled to deliver outcomes in aligned EMEA Enterprise accounts
  • Role type: People manager + overall technical sales account oversight

Revenue alignment:

• • This role is directly assigned to the Theater Enterprise Portworx and  Everpure Cloud quota and is expected to meet and exceed TCV Sales goals.
  • The Director is accountable for measurable increases in ARR and NRR across a range of Enterprise accounts.
  • CNAs have primary account assignments while also being goaled on overall Theater quota performance, ensuring the team operates as a focused unit without losing shared accountability.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

1. Build, Develop, & Inspire a Team of Top Performers:
   • Hire/onboard quickly with clear expectations, coaching, and development plans.
• Build and maintain a strong bench of Technical Sales talent aligned to current and future needs.
• Partner with recruiting to attract, hire, and onboard high-quality candidates in a timely manner.
• Coach and develop direct reports through regular feedback, mentorship, and clear expectations.
• Curate & maintain Individual Development Plans that support both role effectiveness and long-term career growth.
• Foster an inclusive, collaborative team environment that encourages learning, ownership, and accountability.
• Establish a coverage model that assigns primary accounts and defines domain ownership within global accounts (BU/geo/platform), with explicit escalation criteria.
• Support personnel development in alignment with HR guidelines and company values.
2. Provide Sales Process Oversight, Guidance, and Feedback: 
• Guide CNAs in applying the Technical Sales Process to improve opportunity focus, deal quality, and execution.
• Use opportunity data as a decision-support and coaching tool, not an activity-reporting mechanism.
• Drive disciplined prioritization and disqualification to protect scarce CNA capacity.

3. Co-seller + partner alignment that improves outcomes:

• Run a regular cadence with co-seller Technical Sales leaders focused on meaningful changes in status, risk, sentiment, velocity, and where technical leadership removes friction.
• Co-sponsor targeted Portworx and Pure Storage Cloud efforts for a small number of priority customers where technical leadership materially influences outcomes for the entire Pure Storage portfolio.
• Establish recurring partner cadences focused on progression, readiness, pipeline health, and risk reduction.
4. Coordinate Feature & Solution Feedback with Business Units:
• Lead bi-weekly working sessions with Product Managers and peers to align on releases, readiness, and feature evolution. 
• Provide synthesized insight tied to real deployment/adoption patterns (patterns > isolated requests).
• Prioritize RFEs for clarity and meaningful customer impact over volume/noise

WHAT YOU BRING 

• Creativity, empathy, an open mind, curiosity and a desire for continuous learning
• Pre-sales experience is required
• 5 or more years of relevant experience, mixed among technology, design, and communications required. Experience supporting the sales of enterprise storage, networking, systems, cloud, or software to enterprise accounts preferred
• Deep understanding of the architecture, design and implementation of multi-tiered client/server and web-based computing solutions
• Prior experience in targeting new prospects and converting them into clients
• Contribute significant portions and/or lead responses to RFPs, RFQs and RFIs
• Superior knowledge of current and emerging storage architectures (FC, iSCSI, NAS, OSD, SAN)
• Linux, NFS file systems and Linux distributed network environment
• Familiarity with AWS, Azure, GCP a plus
• Installation/configuration of distributed computing, multiprocessing, virtual memory subsystem, storage subsystems architecture, shared memory architectures, cache architectures, windowing systems
• Familiarity with containers, k8s and microservices architectures a plus
• Strong knowledge of digital transformation to a Cloud Native architecture, On-Prem, Public Cloud, Provisioning Automation, and Containers
• Knowledge of VMware, Local Area Networking, Ethernet, TCP/IP and general networking
• Excellent verbal and written interpersonal skills
• BS in CS, EE or other technical degree and/or equivalent experience
• Must have a familiarity with modern web architecture a plus (LAMP stack, scale-out vs scale-up architectures, AWS well-architected framework, microservices architecture)
• Curiosity and passion around technology and explaining and showing new technology platforms and concepts to customers