Principal Solutions Engineer

At F5, we strive to bring a better digital world to life. Our teams empower organizations across the globe to create, secure, and run applications that enhance how we experience our evolving digital world. We are passionate about cybersecurity, from protecting consumers from fraud to enabling companies to focus on innovation.

Everything we do centers around people. That means we obsess over how to make the lives of our customers, and their customers, better. And it means we prioritize a diverse F5 community where each individual can thrive.

The Sr Solutions Engineer (SE) is a sales and technical role, part of a sales team, working with F5 end-user customers and partners. The high-level objective is, together with a Named Account Manager, achieve the allocated sales target by selling F5’s solutions to a pre-defined number of end-user accounts. Critical to the success is the SE’s ability to work with end-users and F5 channel partners, to drive F5 solution sales, doing demonstrations, Proof of Concept tests (hands-on) that allow successful implementation of F5 technologies at those selected accounts.

The SE primary responsibility is to develop and deliver the sales team’s technical strategy, ensuring that the best matching and business effective F5 solutions are driven to her/his customers.

In customer engagements, the F5 SE should always engage customers with a Consultative Sales approach. This approach requires that the SE works to proactively learn and fully understand existing business and technical solutions and identify key “pain points”, challenges, and, most importantly, the gains achieved by implementing a F5 solution. You are able to discuss both technical and business benefits and not just technical features, establishing a value relationship and become the trusted advisor to your customers.

Collaboration is key to success, hence you should jointly, together with your team’s F5 salesperson, fully understand and drive the sales process, which should include identifying the Technical Decision Maker (TDM) and getting technical validation, support, and sponsorship from the TDM. And, as we always sell through our channel partners, the proposed solutions should be jointly defined with the partner sales team’s close participation so that together we can build business value propositions which address and solve real customer’s needs.

In terms of knowledge, the SE needs to have solid technical skills on F5 key solutions’ use-cases and the broader ecosystem that we work with. But, while the SE is encouraged to be able to balance requests around the whole set of F5 solutions, we expect that she/he works towards building deeper expertise only in a very reduced set of use-cases (Prime Solution), becoming the regional expert for the chosen use-cases, supporting other SEs just like she/he will also be supported by other experts in other key use-cases. Strong technical skills are a prerequisite and should continuously be improved as F5 provides training and certification opportunities.

Primary responsibilities:

• Understand the needs and objectives of our customers, and then design a technical solution which can build a new customer service or solve customer business problems
• As a trusted advisor, provide Technical expertise through sales presentations, Solution designs, Solution demonstrations, Proof of Concept tests
• Design differentiating solutions and articulate business value of F5 Solutions
• Provide solution designs and suggest technical configurations
• Develop and maintain a high level of technical knowledge of F5, the relevant industry and Sales aptitude
• Participate in the development and support of content (presentations, VP’s, use cases…) for customers and partners
• Foster a collaborative, team-based environment, sharing best practices and success and building positive relationships
• Maintain knowledge of competitive landscape and share knowledge
• Actively utilize SE tools: Salesforce.com, sharepoint, email groups, and other SE Readiness programs
• Understand and effectively utilize F5 organizational resources
• Effectively negotiate and pursue conflict resolution
• Uphold F5’s Business Code of Ethics; promptly reporting violations of the Code or other company policies

Customer sales activities includes:

• Proactively develop relationships with technical teams in her/his accounts, complementing the efforts of her/his team’s account manager
• Articulate the F5 Sales Strategy, Messaging and Positioning of F5 solutions and their value proposition to address customer business outcomes
• Identify, qualify and drive opportunities from the technical perspective
• Help figure out viability of opportunity and map out political structure
• Deliver sales pitch/whiteboards at technical and CxO level

Post-sales activities include:

• Understand and follow F5’s support case critical issue process
• Partner with the F5 Technical Support, guiding customers and partners on how they can more quickly resolve their cases
• Always keep a “Customer Obsession” mentality and attitude

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• Excellent written and oral communication skills in her/his native language and in English
• Excellent presentation skills
• Proficient knowledge in Industry and F5 Networks-targeted technologies (Security, Cloud)
• Proficient knowledge in Network & Multi-Cloud Design
• Experience with Networking technologies (switching & routing), SNMP, and syslog
• Experience with Identity Management and Federation technologies (AD, Radius, TACACS+, LDAP, SAML, OAuth)
• Experience with Network Security (Firewall, IDS/IPS, Access Control)
• Experience working with Application Security (WAF)
• Experience with DNS, HTTP, SSL & TLS, TCP/IP

Demonstrate knowledge in:

• Configuration and troubleshooting of servers
• Network and Server Virtualization Technologies
• Active Directory & Domain Design
• Programming/scripting languages such as Python, TCL, Java, Perl, C/C++, etc.
• Automation and Orchestration tools, such as Chef, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform, etc.
• AWS, Azure & Google Cloud Platforms

Qualifications:

• 8+ years related industry experience
• 5+ years pre-sales experience, working with channels partners
• BS/BA or equivalent work experience

The Job Description is intended to be a general representation of the responsibilities and requirements of the job. However, the description may not be all-inclusive, and responsibilities and requirements are subject to change.

Please note that F5 only contacts candidates through F5 email address (ending with @f5.com) or auto email notification from Workday (ending with f5.com or @myworkday.com).

Equal Employment Opportunity

It is the policy of F5 to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and employment applicants without regard to unlawful considerations of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, age, sensory, physical, or mental disability, marital status, veteran or military status, genetic information, or any other classification protected by applicable local, state, or federal laws. This policy applies to all aspects of employment, including, but not limited to, hiring, job assignment, compensation, promotion, benefits, training, discipline, and termination. F5 offers a variety of reasonable accommodations for candidates. Requesting an accommodation is completely voluntary. F5 will assess the need for accommodations in the application process separately from those that may be needed to perform the job. Request by contacting accommodations@f5.com.