Senior Solutions Engineer – Data Platform Pre-Sales

Cloudera; Pennsylvania; Hybrid; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous PTO

Flexible WFH Policy

Wellness programs

Career development

Comprehensive benefits

Employee resource groups

Job summary

Cloudera is seeking a Solutions Engineer to drive the pre-sales process in close partnership with Account Executives, delivering tailored solution designs and compelling demos to win deals. You will work with customers to uncover business drivers, technical goals, and pain points, translating them into measurable outcomes.

The role emphasizes discovery, architecture design, and collaboration with sales, product, and engineering teams, with a strong focus on open-source data ecosystems and modern

Qualifications

• 5+ years in a pre-sales customer-facing role (Solutions Engineer or similar).
• Experience in technical discovery, whiteboarding proposed solutions, running demos, and building PoCs.
• Experience with public cloud infrastructures (AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud, etc.) and interest in cloud certification.
• Experience with the Apache Hadoop ecosystem (HDFS, YARN) and related components (Spark, Hive, Impala, Kudu, Solr, etc.).
• Knowledge of Data Lakes, Data Warehousing, SQL, and relational database patterns.
• Experience with data flow, queues and stream processing (Nifi, Kafka, Flink, Spark).
• Basic software development experience in Java, Scala or Python.
• Interest in open-source software and development practices.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a trusted technical advisor throughout the pre-sales lifecycle, leading technical discovery, custom solution design, and interactive demos to translate customer pain points into high-value business outcomes.
• Create and deliver customer-centric solution designs, proposed architectures and business outcomes to all levels - developers, architects, CTO, and CIO.
• Advise customers on use case patterns through discovery and requirements workshops.
• Work with teammates and management to define technical selling strategy.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams including Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Services, Support, Training, and Engineering to share Cloudera's Vision with customers.
• Transform customer feedback into actionable product roadmap items.
• Champion and drive adoption of key open-source data ecosystems, including Spark, Iceberg, Open Data Lakehouse architectures, AI, and streaming platforms (NiFi, Kafka, Flink).
• Participate within the Cloudera community, share evangelism activities (blogs, meetups, industry events), and contribute to internal and external knowledge repositories

Skills

Pre-sales experience

Technical discovery

Public cloud experience

Hadoop ecosystem familiarity

SQL & data warehousing

Data lake architectures

Java/Scala/Python basics

Communication & collaboration

Open-source software interest

Education

Bachelor's Degree in a Technical Field

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenShift

Spark

NiFi

Kafka

Flink

Hadoop

Job description

Cloudera is seeking a Solutions Engineer to drive the pre-sales process in close partnership with Account Executives, delivering tailored solution designs and compelling demos to win deals. You will work with customers to uncover business drivers, technical goals, and pain points, translating them into measurable outcomes.

The role emphasizes discovery, architecture design, and collaboration with sales, product, and engineering teams, with a strong focus on open-source data ecosystems and modern