Senior Principal Solutions Architect
It's fun to work in a company where people truly BELIEVE in what they're doing!
Job Description Summary:
The Senior Principal Solutions Architect – Vertica is a highly experienced technical leader responsible for driving adoption of Rocket Software ’s Vertica analytics platform across complex, data intensive enterprise environments.
Operating at the intersection of deep analytical database expertise, presales execution, and business value storytelling, this role partners with Sales, Product, Engineering, and ecosystem partners to design and position differentiated, high performance analytical solutions.
As a trusted advisor to customers and a senior leader within Rocket, the Solutions Architect influences customer data strategies, leads high impact proof of concepts, and demonstrates how Vertica delivers exceptional performance, scalability, and cost efficiency within modern data architectures.
This role has broad impact across both customer outcomes and internal technical strategy, helping define best practices, shape technical sales approaches, and elevate the Solutions Architecture function. Key Responsibilities
Strategic Customer Engagement & Solution Design
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to enterprise customers, translating business challenges into scalable Vertica-based analytical architectures
- Lead discussions across data warehousing, data lake analytics, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments
- Influence customer data platform and modernization strategies , positioning Vertica as the core analytical engine
- Engage effectively with stakeholders ranging from hands-on engineers to senior executives
Proof of Concept & Benchmark Leadership
- Own the end-to-end design and execution of competitive proof-of-concepts (POCs) and performance benchmarks under tight sales timelines
- Translate technical outcomes (query performance, compression, concurrency) into compelling business value (cost reduction, speed, ROI)
- Design realistic data models, workloads, and benchmarking frameworks aligned to customer use cases
- Clearly differentiate Vertica from alternative MPP and cloud data warehouse solutions
Technical Sales Leadership
- Lead the technical strategy for new business, expansion, and strategic opportunities
- Partner closely with Sales to develop account strategies, deal plans, and winning technical narratives
- Guide and mentor Sales Engineers, ensuring high-quality demos and solution validation
- Drive complex, multi-stakeholder technical sales cycles from discovery through close
Data Architecture & Modern Data Stack Integration
- Design solutions integrating Vertica across modern ecosystems, including:
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Ingestion: Kafka, Spark, streaming pipelines
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Storage: S3, HDFS, object storage
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Consumption: Tableau, Power BI, Looker, and other BI platforms
- Provide guidance on:
- Data modelling and schema design
- Data governance, quality, and cleansing practices
- ETL/ELT pipeline architecture and performance optimisation
Hands-on Technical Execution
- Write and optimise complex analytical SQL queries on large-scale datasets
- Develop scripts (Python, shell) to support automation, data loading, and demo environments
- Deploy and configure Vertica environments across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud platforms
- Troubleshoot performance issues and optimise query execution in real-time scenarios
Ecosystem & Partner Collaboration
- Work closely with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), GSIs, VARs, and ISVs to deliver joint solutions
- Support co-sell opportunities and align on shared value propositions
- Contribute to partner enablement and field readiness
Thought Leadership & Organisational Impact
- Define and promote best practices, architectural patterns, and reusable assets across the Solutions Architecture community
- Influence technical sales strategy, including POC methodologies and competitive positioning frameworks
- Mentor and coach other Solutions Architect