Storage Presales Technical Architect - UKI Defence

Storage Presales Technical Architect - UKI Defence

This role has been designed as 'Hybrid' with a requirement that you will work on average 2 days per week from an HPE office.

Who We Are

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is the global edge-to-cloud company advancing the way people live and work. We help companies connect, protect, analyze, and act on their data and applications wherever they live, from edge to cloud, so they can turn insights into outcomes at the speed required to thrive in today’s complex world. Our culture thrives on finding new and better ways to accelerate what’s next.

We know varied backgrounds are valued and succeed here. We have the flexibility to manage our work and personal needs. We make bold moves, together, and are a force for good.

If you are looking to stretch and grow your career our culture will embrace you. Open up opportunities with HPE.

Job Description

We are looking for our next Storage Presales Architect to join the growing Data Solutions team, supporting HPE's UK Public Sector Defence business. This is a highly visible role focused on helping defence organisations, government agencies, and strategic technology partners unlock the value of their data and infrastructure investments.

Working across a broad spectrum of defence and national security customers, you will engage with business and technology leaders to shape strategy, solve complex challenges, and deliver mission critical outcomes.

This is an exciting time to join the team. As defence investment continues to grow, with significant funding being directed towards digital transformation, cyber resilience, and modern data capabilities, Defence remains HPE UK's largest Public Sector sub-vertical and represents a major growth opportunity for the business.

We are looking for a proactive, high energy individual who thrives in a dynamic environment and enjoys influencing across customers, partners, and internal teams. You will help drive opportunities from early discovery through to successful adoption, creating meaningful impact across some of the UK's most strategically important organisations.

The ideal candidate will bring expertise across:

• Enterprise storage and data management
• Private and hybrid cloud architectures
• Virtualisation and modern workloads
• Structured and unstructured data platforms
• Data protection, cyber resilience, and disaster recovery
• Software-defined and hyperconverged infrastructure

Combining strong technical knowledge with business acumen, the successful candidate will translate complex requirements into secure, outcome focused solutions, acting as a trusted advisor to customers and partners while helping accelerate growth across HPE's Defence business.

Job Family Definition

Responsible for architecting solutions that will achieve customer business outcomes either within a specific technical domain, or across the broader company portfolio (hardware, software, services, and as a service offerings) in combination with all necessary third-party components (e.g. software and integration).

Develops and articulates compelling, accurate, and relevant proposals and ensures customer's business and technical requirements are met. Can be aligned to a specific area of technical expertise (e.g., products, solutions, services). Provides technical expertise to sales teams and customers (through sales presentations, product/solution demonstrations, etc.) aimed at gaining the customer mindshare within their domain.

These jobs focus on technical selling to customers/partners. May be aligned to specific accounts based on business priority.

Management Level Definition

Contributions impact technical components of HPE products, solutions, or services regularly and sustainable. Applies advanced subject matter knowledge to solve complex business issues and is regarded as a subject matter expert. Provides expertise and partnership to functional and technical project teams and may participate in cross-functional initiatives.

Exercises significant independent judgment to determine best method for achieving objectives. May provide team leadership and mentoring to others.

Responsibilities

• Demonstrates in-depth knowledge in one or more solution domains, company products, services, and solutions as well as the customer’s technical and business environment.
• Develops compelling customer proposals and critically reviews them, manages the expectations of internal stakeholders and customers, ensuring the meeting of customer’s business and technical requirements are met.
• Quantifies the impact of the business problem(s), positions business value, identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the overall proposed solution to achieve long-term business objectives.
• Provides input to all global business units to address IT trends, requirements, gaps, or unmet needs.
• Translates outcome-based solutions into a functional solution design that aligns to the customers business needs, and then translates that functional design into a technical design and architecture that can be scaled to accommodate growth.
• Communicates how the solution value propositions addresses customer business needs.
• Tracks leading-edge and emerging technologies.
• Contributes to industry development for one or more domains through conferences (content support/presentations, demos, booth support) and industry events, while also monitoring social media.
• Incorporates an understanding of technology trends within the IT industry, as well as the customer’s industry.
• Actively gathers and applies competitive intelligence as a critical component of account support.
• Drives the Account Business Planning process, leveraging knowledge of industry trends and the customer’s technical environment.
• Participates in deep-dive discussions and partners with the account team to build customer relationships at all levels by advocating and presenting technical strategies for a customer's transformation.
• Produces in-depth comparative analysis of alternative approaches to meet solution requirements.
• Develops, configures, and right sizes an optimal workload solution, balancing cost, scope, scale, boundaries, and benefits to deliver superior value and increase the win rate.
• Leverages deep knowledge of partner products and services and adjusts strategies to leverage the relationship between the service provider/partner and the customer.
• Successfully transfers knowledge to external partners to deliver effective solutions to customers.
• Proactively builds the pipeline by identifying opportunities (e.g., enhancements, unmet or unrecognized needs, up-selling, and cross-selling opportunities) within the account.
• Monitors the account pipeline and nurtures active deals from the opportunity to close.
• Uses pipeline insights to help prioritize activities in a way that ensures time, and resources are invested wisely in pursuit of deals with the highest potential.
• Actively participates in sales forecast meetings and provides feedback to accelerate the sales lifecycle.
• Documents ongoing work (activities, tasks) throughout the sales cycle using specific tools and resources and sharing best practices with peers and partners to collaborate more effectively.
• Builds strong professional relationships with customer key executives across the business and industry.
• Proactively shares knowledge with peers and helps develop more junior team members.

Education and Experience:

• First-level university technical degree or equivalent technical qualifications. Advanced degree in technology preferred.
• 8–12 years of technical experience in IT with a focus on technical consulting and solution selling
• Knowledge-based as well as 1+ experienced-based relevant industry certifications very strongly preferred.
• Enterprise architecture frameworks and project management methodologies and certifications are helpful, but not required.

Knowledge and Skills:

• Advanced experience participating in and leading