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

Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) is hiring a Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer to support our Higher Education business, with a focus on R1 research universities.

R1 institutions are not one customer. A single campus can behave like a dozen different organizations at the same time: central IT running enterprise applications, research computing and HPC teams, genomics and imaging cores, AI and machine learning labs competing for GPU time, an academic medical center with its own rules and its own budget, and faculty groups buying infrastructure directly with grant money. Decisions move through CIOs, research computing directors, principal investigators, sponsored programs offices, procurement, and consortium contract vehicles, often in parallel and not always in agreement.

That environment rewards someone who can hold a lot of context at once, translate between very different audiences, and connect technology to the outcomes these institutions actually care about: time to result for researchers, compliance with sponsor and grant requirements, data that stays usable for a decade or more, and budgets that have to stretch further every year.

You will be the technical lead on these accounts, working alongside account managers, specialists, and partners to build solutions customers can defend internally, both technically and financially.

• Develop a real understanding of what drives each institution: research priorities, funding cycles, capital versus operating constraints, and who actually makes the decision
• Connect technology, including the Everpure portfolio and the broader ecosystem, to measurable research and institutional outcomes
• Move fluently between principal investigators, research computing staff, central IT, CIOs, finance, and procurement, adapting the conversation to each audience instead of delivering the same presentation
• Build the business case alongside the technical one: total cost of ownership, power and cooling, data center footprint, staff time, and the real cost of the current environment
• Support research workloads end to end, from instrument and sequencer output through HPC and AI pipelines to long-term retention and archive
• Help customers work through data management questions: lifecycle and retention, reproducibility, sponsor and funding agency data sharing expectations, research data governance, and security requirements such as NIST 800-171 and CMMC where they apply
• Partner closely with account managers, specialists, channel partners, and higher education purchasing consortia and contract vehicles
• Take ownership of evaluations, benchmarks, proofs of concept, and system configurations, and secure the technical win