Solutions Engineer

Cisco; Birmingham; On-site; GBP 65,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Splunk, a Cisco company, is seeking a Solutions Engineer to support the UK Commercial Sales team. You will be the technical advisor, building rapport with client staff and driving proof activities to convert opportunities into validated value.

You will develop technical plans, run workshops and PoCs, and present solutions across Splunk's platform to ensure alignment with customer needs and business outcomes.

Qualifications

• Experience communicating clearly in meetings, calls, emails and RFPs.
• Strong presentation and demonstration skills with ability to use stories.
• Active listening and good organizational skills.

Responsibilities

• Establish and own strong technical relationships within the territories you support.
• Own achieving the ‘technical win’; moving opportunities from qualification to technical validation and into business validation.
• Develop technical activity plans to help the customer technically validate the Splunk products and services and achieve meaningful value outcomes post-sale.
• Partner with the Regional Sales Manager in in-person and remote meetings with customers to discover customers’ needs and how Splunk can meet those needs.
• Support our clients through the buying process by running presentations, demonstrations, workshops and answering technical questions to validate Splunk as the right solution.
• Scope and run Proof of Concepts with clients to agreed success criteria and timelines.
• Ensure your knowledge and skills of Splunk solutions are up to date.
• Maintain timely updates on the state of your opportunities in Salesforce.

Skills

Linux/Windows

Networking basics

Cloud platforms

Python

REST APIs

Container orchestration

SaaS sales experience

Security operations knowledge

DevOps knowledge

Job description

Splunk - a Cisco company, provides the Unified Security and Observability Platform. The world’s leading organisations trust Splunk to go from insight to action fast and at scale; organisations such as McLaren, Heineken, and Tesco are turning data into action with Splunk. Join us as we pursue our innovative vision to make machine data accessible, usable and valuable to everyone. Our company is filled with people passionate about our solutions and seeking to deliver the best experience and outcomes for our customers. At Splunk, we’re committed to our work, customers, having fun and, most importantly, to each other’s success. This is an opportunity to work at a company that is changing how information supports business decisions and makes the world a more digitally resilient place. Splunk seeks a highly motivated, outcome-focused individual to join our Solutions Engineering team as a Solutions Engineer (SE). As a Splunk SE, you’ll be a technical sales resource for the UK Commercial Sales team supporting our clients in the UK. You will be the authority regarding the technical aspects of solutions and how they integrate within our clients' workflow and tooling. Solutions Engineers must be comfortable building rapport with their client’s technical staff, serving as a trusted adviser within the accounts that they support. To this extent, communication is key; your ability to communicate well and engage with the right people in the right way in a timely manner is essential to this role. The SE develops and owns technical proof activities to drive new and expansion opportunities, increase product usage, and generate new sales pipeline through workshops, office hours, and Q&A sessions. In addition to providing technical guidance, Splunk SEs understand their clients' businesses well and can tailor their solution positioning to both a business and technical audience.

Responsibilities; I want to and can do these:

• Establish and own strong technical relationships within the territories you support.
• Own achieving the ‘technical win’; moving opportunities from qualification to technical validation and into business validation.
• Develop technical activity plans to help the customer technically validate the Splunk products and services and achieve meaningful value outcomes post-sale.
• Partner with the Regional Sales Manager in in-person and remote meetings with customers to discover customers’ needs and how Splunk can meet those needs.
• Support our clients through the buying process by running presentations, demonstrations, workshops and answering technical questions to validate Splunk as the right solution.
• Scope and run Proof of Concepts with clients to agreed success criteria and timelines.
• Ensure your knowledge and skills of Splunk solutions are up to date.
• Maintain timely updates on the state of your opportunities in Salesforce.

Attributes; this is who I am:

• Self-motivated; to research and learn to fill gaps in knowledge and provide the best buying experience to our clients.
• Innovative; in finding solutions to customer needs, proving integrations, and developing workshops and demonstrations.
• Passionate; in solving meaningful problems with data.
• Disruptive; work closely with the SE team and SE management to challenge, develop and continually improve working practices and processes.
• Curious; with a growth mindset and willingness to be coached.
• Adaptable; with the ability to shift to constantly evolving requirements.

Requirements; I’ve got or done these things in the past:

• Ability to communicate clearly and appropriately in meetings, phone calls, emails, RFPs, and when submitting reports, both externally with customers and internally.
• Strong presentation and demonstration skills with an ability to use stories effectively.
• Ability to actively listen.
• Good organisational, prioritisation and time management skills.

Required Technical Knowledge; Yes, I’ve got these:

• Linux or Windows knowledge
• Basic network connectivity troubleshooting
• Infrastructure as a Service platforms: AWS, GCP and/or Azure
• IT architecture concepts such as High Availability, Disaster Recovery

Highly Desirable Knowledge and Experience; I even have some or all of these:

• Experience selling SaaS services or data solutions or working in a sales/commercial environment.
• Domain knowledge in any of: security operations, DevOps, IT operations, big data or log management.
• Experience using regular expressions.
• Experience coding in Python.
• Experience working with REST APIs.
• Experience with container and container orchestration technology.

Why Cisco?

At Cisco, we’re revolutionizing how data and infrastructure connect and protect organizations in the AI era – and beyond. We’ve been innovating fearlessly for 40 years to create solutions that power how humans and technology work together across the physical and digital worlds. These solutions provide customers with unparalleled security, visibility, and insights across the entire digital footprint.
Fueled by the depth and breadth of our technology, we experiment and create meaningful solutions. Add to that our worldwide network of doers and experts, and you’ll see that the opportunities to grow and build are limitless. We work as a team, collaborating with empathy to make really big things happen on a global scale. Because our solutions are everywhere, our impact is everywhere.
We are Cisco, and our power starts with you.