Senior Pre-Sales Systems Engineer, Higher Education (Mid-Atlantic)

Pure Storage

Remote

Full Time

Posted September 18, 2026

$141k - $212k

Power Generation

Remote

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Job Description

If you meet most of the required list and few of the second list, we would still like to hear from you.

Key Responsibilities

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
Capture requirements and translate them into solutions that help institutions grow their research capability rather than just their capacity
Author responses to RFIs, RFPs, and RFQs, which in this segment are frequent and detailed
Stay current on the competitive landscape and make sure our positioning reflects it honestly
Follow market and research computing trends closely enough to bring that thinking back into our organization
Lead by example living the Pure Values: Persistence, Creativity, Teamwork, Ownership and Customer-first