Pre-sales Engineer

We not only apply cutting-edge technology. We create it.

We're looking for a new Pre-sales Engineer to join our Pre-Sales team. You will be the technical backbone of our Sales team and Account Executives: embedded next to them throughout the sales cycle, you'll help them win deals by turning customer requirements into geo-distributed, S3-compatible storage architectures built on the customer's own hardware, and by giving them the technical confidence to talk to customers, partners and internal teams from the first discovery call to the go-live.

You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with the AEs on every step: discovery, solution design, proof of concept and final proposal. You’ll deep dive into challenging design sessions with our R&D and Delivery teams. Most importantly, you'll be part of the future of the cloud.

What you’ll do

• Own the technical side of the deal together with the Account Executive: discovery, requirements gathering, solution design, sizing and technical validation;
• Design geo-distributed object storage architectures on the customer's own hardware (on-premises, bare metal or cloud), defining redundancy classes, data-protection overhead and Coordinator layouts;
• Run Proofs of Value and PoCs end to end: scoping, hardware and network prerequisites, deployment, test plan, success criteria and results readout;
• Build TCO and business-case analyses comparing Cubbit against hyperscalers, appliances and open-source alternatives;
• Produce the technical documentation of the offer: solution project documents, hardware bill of materials, technical annexes and compliance answers for public tenders;
• Act as the technical counterpart for our partners (service providers, system integrators, resellers) and support them in designing their own branded storage service;
• Design and validate integrations with the backup, virtualisation and Kubernetes ecosystem (Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, Portworx, CSI drivers and NAS gateways);
• Support the handover to Delivery and Customer Success and stay involved in the first deployments in production;
• Feed field feedback back into Product and R&D: gaps, feature requests, roadmap priorities;
• Contribute to internal knowledge: reference architectures, sizing tools, white papers and competitive battle cards.

What you’ll need

• 3-5 years of experience in a customer-facing technical role (Solution Architect, Sales/Pre-Sales Engineer);
• Proven experience operating as the technical partner of a Sales team and Account Executives, supporting them side-by-side through the full sales cycle: from discovery call and solution design to proposal and go-live;
• Track record as technical lead on complex enterprise or public-sector deals: multi-stakeholder buying committees (IT, security, procurement, finance), sales cycles of several months, formal technical evaluations and PoCs.
• Experience designing infrastructure at data-centre scale: multi-site deployments from hundreds of TB to PB, with real constraints on network, power, rack space and operations.
• Ability to turn non-functional requirements (RTO/RPO, availability and resilience targets, security, sovereignty and compliance) into an architecture and a bill of materials the customer can sign off.
• Strong knowledge of object storage and of the S3 API (buckets, IAM policies, versioning, object lock, lifecycle);
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and data-protection schemes (erasure coding, replication, failure domains, durability/availability trade-offs);
• Experience with Linux operating systems and with containerised workloads (Docker, Kubernetes);
• Solid understanding of networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, TLS/PKI, HTTP, APIs, load balancing, VPN);
• Experience with storage hardware sizing (CPU/RAM/disk/NIC, RAID, JBOD) and with virtualisation or bare-metal environments;
• Knowledge of identity and access management (local users, LDAP/AD, SAML/OIDC, 2FA);
• Ability to lead technical discussions with enterprise IT architects and to defend a design in front of C-level stakeholders, procurement and the customer’s consultants.
• Full proficiency in Italian and English (written and spoken).
• Hands-on experience with competing platforms (MinIO, Ceph, Scality, Cloudian, Dell ECS, NetApp StorageGRID, Quantum);
• Experience with network file protocols (NFS/SMB) and NAS-gateway architectures;
• Experience with public tenders and public-sector procurement (technical specifications, MePA, technical annexes);+
• Familiarity with GDPR, NIS2, DORA, the EU Data Act and with sovereignty and ACN qualification requirements;
• Scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python, Go, Ansible, Helm, Terraform);
• Experience with monitoring and benchmarking tools (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetr