Solution Expert

World Aquatics; Grenoble; À distance; EUR 85 000 - 120 000; Plein temps

Avantages offerts par ce poste

Meal vouchers

Health insurance

Works Council benefits

Employee savings plan (PEE)

Profit-sharing scheme

Annual bonus

100% remote work

Résumé du poste

Vates is a French software company specializing in Open Source and virtualization, seeking a Solutions Expert to design and deliver technical solutions for customers while supporting sales and presales activities. You will bridge customers, partners, and internal teams to propose best-fit solutions and contribute to RFI/RFP responses.

You will design architectures, validate environments, and provide delivery support, ensuring production-ready solutions with a focus on performance, high

Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent.
• Experience designing end-to-end IT architectures.
• Strong virtualization, storage, networking knowledge.

Responsabilités

• Design and validate technical architectures meeting customer needs.
• Act as technical reference across sales, product, delivery and support teams.
• Support pre-sales activities with demos, POCs, and RFI/RFP responses.
• Guide adoption, configuration, and best practices during deployment.

Connaissances

Solution design

Virtualization

APIs & integration

DevOps (Terraform, Ansible)

Monitoring & observability

Security by design

Cross-functional collaboration

Technical leadership

Fluent English & French

Formation

Master’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Outils

VMware

Hyper-V

KVM

Veeam

Commvault

Terraform

Ansible

Description du poste

Vates is a French software company specializing in virtualization, offering a credible alternative to proprietary solutions on the market. Our Vates VMS solution enables companies to manage their IT infrastructures in a simple, efficient, and controlled way. As part of our growth, we are looking for a Solutions Expert to design and deliver technical solutions that address customer business needs while supporting sales and presales activities alongside the Sales and Channel teams. Acting as the link between customers, partners, and internal teams, the Solutions Expert recommends the best-fit solutions, collaborates closely with partners on strategic accounts, and works cross-functionally with R&D, Product, Support, Delivery, Sales, and Channel teams to drive customer success.

**Your responsabilities** :

As a Solutions Expert, you design and validate technical architectures that meet customer business needs. You act as the technical reference across sales, product, delivery, and support teams, ensuring robust, scalable, and production‑ready solutions.

**Technical & Functional Expertise**

• Understanding of VATES VMS stack, products, modules, APIs, and integrations
• Analysis of customer business and technical requirements to propose the most suitable solution
• Design of architectures meeting production constraints: performance, scalability, high availability, resilience

**Validation of environments involving**

• Virtualization (VMware, Hyper‑V, KVM)
• Storage systems (SAN/NAS, multipathing, redundancy, IOPS sizing)
• Networking (Switching iSCSI / Fiber Channel)
• Backup & DR (Veeam, CommVault, snapshot strategies, RPO/RTO)
• Observability & metrology

**Pre‑Sales Activities**

• Participation in demos, workshops, technical qualification meetings, must-win deals reviews
• Creation and presentation of POCs, prototypes, and solution mockups
• Contribution to RFI/RFP/RFQ responses (technical & functional sections)
• Translation of customer needs into concrete, feasible, and cost‑controlled proposals

**Customer Advisory & Delivery Support**

• Guidance on adoption, configuration, and best practices
• Identification of gaps between customer needs and product capabilities
• Recommendations for complementary services (training, optimisation, premium support)
• Support during production deployment, ensuring stability, performance, and operational continuity

**Internal Collaboration**

• Feedback to Product/R&D/Documentation teams to influence roadmap and improvements
• Assistance to Support teams on complex infrastructure or integration issues
• Collaboration with Customer Success to anticipate risks (misuse, dissatisfaction, churn)

**Continuous Expertise Development**

• Monitoring of technological trends: virtualization, storage, backup, HA/DR
• Updating internal/external documentation and participate to update technical sales materials

**Partner & Ecosystem Relations**

• Collaboration with distributors, resellers, integrators, cloud providers and complementary software/hardware vendors
• Identification of integration opportunities and technical synergies and or ecosystems
• Participation in joint marketing actions (webinars, events, customer presentations, partner technical onboarding)

**External Representation**

• Presence at trade shows, conferences, and partner events
• Technical demonstrations and discussions with prospects and partners
• Collection of field feedback to refine product and commercial strategy

**Required Skills**

• Strong ability to design end-to-end IT solutions and translate business needs into technical architectures
• Strong knowledge of virtualization
• Good knowledge of operating systems, storage, compute and networks and the entire ecosystem of the end-user
• Good understanding of cybersecurity principles, IAM, and security‑by‑design approaches
• Experience with APIs and system integration
• Familiarity with DevOps practices and infrastructure automation (Terraform, Ansible, scripting, etc)
• Ability to understand and use monitoring, logging, and performance analysis tools to ensure system reliability
• Strong troubleshooting skills and ability to validate and optimize complex technical solutions
• Ability to simplify technical concepts for non‑technical audiences
• Technical leadership
• Analytical and solution‑oriented mindset
• Strong personality with high resilience under external pressure
• Excellent team player with strong collaboration skills, internally and externally with partners and the ecosystem
• Clear, structured, and effective communicator
• Good speaker and storyteller, sharing passion
• Fast learner with strong adaptability
• Strong sense of ownership and responsibility
• Ability to manage conflicts in a professional and constructive manner
• Ability to think beyond short‑term objectives and understand long‑term strategy
• Fluent English and French

**Why join us** ?

At VATES, you will find a flexible work environment, a supportive and approachable team, and a role that makes a real impact on a daily basis.

**Location** :

Our offices are based in Grenoble or Paris, but we operate on a fully remote model to provide greater flexibility and daily work comfort. You are free to work 100% remotely or come on‑site occasionally, depending on your preferences.

**Benefits** :

• Meal vouchers
• Health insurance coverage funded at 50% by the company
• Benefits provided by the Works Council (employee discounts, cinema tickets, etc)
• Employee savings plan (PEE)
• Profit‑sharing scheme
• Annual bonus
• 100% remote work

As part of our diversity and inclusion policy, this position is open to all candidates, regardless of gender.

Profile required

You will bridge the gap between customer needs and technical solutions, combining architectural expertise with a strong understanding of business requirements.

We are looking for someone with:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent with 5–10 years of experience in software development, infrastructure engineering, or solution architecture
• Strong expertise in:
  • Virtualization (VMware, Hyper‑V, KVM)
  • Storage (SAN/NAS, performance tuning, redundancy)
  • Networking (Switching iSCSI / Fiber Channel)
  • Backup & DR (Veeam, snapshot strategies, RPO/RTO)
  • High availability & production constraints
• Ability to vulgarize complex technical concepts for non‑technical audiences
• Technical leadership, analytical mindset, and strong problem‑solving skills
• Fluent English and French

Company description

Vates is a French software company specializing in Open Source and virtualization, with a strong commitment to open and collaborative development. Our main projects, Xen Orchestra and XCP‑ng, cover the entire virtualization stack — from the hypervisor (Xen) and the virtualization platform (XCP‑ng) to virtual machine management and backup (Xen Orchestra). Our team is distributed across several countries and fully embraces remote work, with transparent working methods and accessible communication channels. At Vates, we are driven by a people‑centered company culture focused on kindness, inclusivity, and a flat organizational structure. Every team member is encouraged to contribute ideas, make decisions, and grow with the company. Our Open Source model is at the core of everything we do — not only in our code, available on GitHub and GitLab, but also in our collaborative approach with the community. We believe in an “upstream first” philosophy, and we dedicate our expertise and resources to fundamental projects such as Xen, while supporting contributors of all levels in joining us on this journey.