Vice President, Solutions

Vice President, Solutions

USA or Canada | Remote | Work from Home

Why you?

We are seeking a strategic and results-driven Vice President of Solutions to lead our Customer Engineering practice as well as refine the structure of this pre-sales team. The position comes with diverse responsibilities that require strong people leadership, deep technology and business skills.

The Vice President, Solutions plays a critical role in the following key areas of responsibility:

• Leadership and Management of Customer Engineering (CE) practice
• Technical Sales Support
• Customer Relationship Development
• Partner Alignment & Technical Relationship Management
• Offering and Portfolio Expansion within Account Base
• Customer Success and Technical Escalation

Key Measures of Success:

• Performance of team including sales attainment, thought leadership & lead generation
• New services bookings
• Renewals including expansion of Recurring Revenue streams
• Generate new leads and opportunities for Pythian through relationship development and management of the Google pre-sales and technical community.

What you will be doing:

• Leadership and Management of Customer Engineering Practice:
• Refining the structure of this pre-sales team including territory coverage, performance measures, role clarification, recruitment, interviewing and onboarding methods.
• Build and mentor an effective team of customer engineers that partner with sales on the technical advisory component of the sales process.
• People management responsibilities including recruitment, training, objectives and key results setting, professional development, and performance management.
• Assessment of and continual improvement of the pre-sales processes from initial meeting to project/service handoff through completion and customer satisfaction.
• Identification, selection and implementation of tools, software and automations to increase CE effectiveness and sales process efficiency.
• Partner with sales territory leaders to prioritize the time of customer engineers, jointly identify key accounts for growth & strategize on value propositions and growth strategies.

• Technical Sales Support - Leads and mentors:
• Engages with assigned or targeted customer organizations. Understands customer business and establishes technical and business credibility with clients providing the ability to cultivate relationships and envision creative sales and solution strategies that generate additional revenue.
• Oversees holistic solutions from both business and technical perspective across all pythian capability areas with an emphasis on key go-to-market motions with partners and direct selling taking into account all realities and constraints such as costs, contract terms, business conditions and the technical environment of the client.
• Organizes and leads technical customer needs identification and scoping calls including ensuring participation of relevant technical resources and drives the proposal and scoping processes to create a viable, competitive and timely solution.
• Leads the creation of customer specific services and technology solutions to include coordinating a team of line of business, solutions, delivery and project management resources, integrating partner technology and teams and owns the production of the client facing SoW.
• Delivers and sells the technical solution strategy and vision to senior client executives ensuring the solution embodies company win themes and key differentiators while meeting client expectations and requirements thereby providing the company the best chance to compete and win.
• Act as lead pre-sales technical resource on named large complex deals and/or strategic pursuits including leading the deal assurance process, acting as the bridge to delivery for solution compliance and competitiveness and supporting delivery capacity planning.

• Customer Relationship Development - Leads and mentors:
• Creates and cultivates key trusted-advisor relationships with senior level IT executives demonstrating an understanding of key business challenges within customer markets and how company technology-enabled business solutions can address those needs.
• Provides leadership to help customers understand best practices around advanced cloud-based solutions, and how to migrate existing workloads to the cloud including modernization and transformation of applications, data platforms and analytics solutions.
• Leverages public and private cloud technologies to continuously find ways to solve customer needs and advise customers on technology standards, methodologies and processes as they relate to their infrastructure, data and applications estate.
• Champions named accounts as the executive sponsor to cultivate an opinion of Pythian as a thought leader enabling growth within the accounts.

• Partner Alignment & Technical Relationship Management - Leads and mentors:
• Builds and maintains relationships with partner pre-sales, solutions and customer engineers.
• Maintains and continually adds individual partner technical certifications and supports the achievement of corporate specializations and program inclusions.
• Conducts joint technical strategy sessions with partner engineers and engagement managers.

• Offering and Portfolio Expansion within Account Base - Leads and mentors:
• Acts as the primary interface to our delivery organization for recommendations on new offerings, upgrades/augmentation to enhance corporate competency in meeting the needs of customers.
• Leads the way with introducing new offerings to our customers and building a technical roadmap for Portfolio Expansion within each customer.

• Customer Success and Technical Escalation - Leads and mentors:
• Actively participates in customer project kick-offs, architecture sessions, key status meetings, milestone reviews and project closeouts.
• Builds a strong relationship with our architects, engineers and project managers, rolling up your sleeves and going deep technically as you work through the details of a particular solution or client challenge.
• Acts as a point of technical consultation and escalation for both client and partner contacts.
• Builds trusted relationships with delivery to leverage and bring forward early warnings to customer project success.
• Building a bridge between delivery and pre-sales resources to work in tandem to move deals forward.

• Raising the Pythian Profile and Brand through Thought Leadership:
• Identifies key criteria for prospecting for workshops and assisting marketing in building these programs.
• Personally participates and contributes to the delivery of customer workshops & design thinking sessions that lead to services engagement & a lasting customer relationship.
• Works with Marketing and Pythian’s CTO to drive Pythian thought leadership in virtual and physical channels.
• Demonstrates thought leadership in the Data, Analytics and Business Transformation Domains - blogs, conference presentations, customer case studies and webinars leveraging our partners.

What we need from you:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field
• Experience working for and holding a leadership role a mid-sized Services company
• Experience in the Google partner ecosystem (ideal), or at a minimum AWS or Azure
• Strong business acumen with the ability to develop and execute strategic plans, drive business growth, and manage budgets effectively
• Excellent leadership, communication, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence and collaborate effectively with stakeholders at all levels and across multiple time zones
• Ability to work across multiple teams and collaborate outside of direct reporting lines will be critical. Gathering feedback and reaching consensus / alignment on various initiatives will be important to achieve the necessary levels of success in this role.
• In depth understanding of corporate KPIs and factors influencing these KPIs
• Exceptional leadership/management skills, effectively managing both up and down with a track record of leading teams to success

What you will get in return:

• Love your career: Competitive total rewards package with an annual bonus
• Love your development: Hone your skills or learn new ones with our substantial training allowance; participate in professional development days, attend conferences, become certified, whatever you like!
• Love your work/life balance: Why commute 5 days per week? Work remotely from your home and out of our offices, there’s no daily travel requirement!
• Love your workspace: We give you all the equipment you need to work from home including a laptop with your choice of OS, and an annual budget to personalize your work environment!
• Love your community: Blog during work hours; take a day off and volunteer for your favorite charity.

Why Pythian?

Pythian excels at helping businesses use their data and cloud to transform how they compete and win in this ever-changing environment by delivering advanced on-prem, hybrid, cloud and multi-cloud solutions to solve the toughest data challenges faster and better than anyone else. Founded and headquartered in Ottawa, Canada in 1997, Pythian now has more than 370 employees located around the globe with over 350 clients spanning industries from SaaS; media; gaming; financial services; e-commerce and more. Pythian is known for its technology-enabled data expertise covering everything from ETL to ML. We pride ourselves on our ability to deliver innovative solutions that meet the specific data goals of each client and have built meaningful partnerships with major cloud vendors AWS, Google and Microsoft. The powerful combination of our extensive expertise in data and cloud and our ability to keep on top of the latest bleeding edge technologies make us the perfect partner to help mid and large-sized businesses transform to stay ahead in today’s rapidly changing digital economy. If you love your data and want to love your career then join us!

Disclaimer

For this job an equivalent combination of education and experience, which results in demonstrated ability to apply skills will also be considered.

Pythian is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from people with disabilities. Accommodations are available upon request for candidates taking part in all aspects of the selection process.

The successful applicant will need to fulfill the requirements necessary to obtain a background check.

Love Your Data is a registered trademark of Pythian Services Inc.