Senior Principal Solutions Architect

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Italy.

📋 Description

• Serve as a reliable technical advisor for enterprise clients, transforming business challenges into scalable analytical architectures based on Vertica.

• Facilitate discussions surrounding data warehousing, data lake analytics, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments.

• Shape customer data platform and modernization initiatives, establishing Vertica as the central analytical engine.

• Interact effectively with stakeholders, from hands-on engineers to senior executives.

• Oversee the complete design and execution of competitive proof-of-concepts (POCs) and performance benchmarks within strict sales timelines.

• Convert technical results (query performance, compression, concurrency) into persuasive business advantages (cost savings, speed, ROI).

• Create realistic data models, workloads, and benchmarking frameworks tailored to customer use cases.

• Clearly distinguish Vertica from other MPP and cloud data warehouse alternatives.

• Direct the technical strategy for new business, expansion, and strategic opportunities.

• Collaborate closely with Sales to create account strategies, deal plans, and effective technical narratives.

• Mentor and guide Sales Engineers, ensuring high-quality demonstrations and solution validations.

• Manage complex, multi-stakeholder technical sales processes from initial discovery to closing.

• Design solutions that integrate Vertica within modern ecosystems, including: Ingestion: Kafka, Spark, streaming pipelines.

• Storage: S3, HDFS, object storage.

• Consumption: Tableau, Power BI, Looker, and other BI platforms.

• Provide expertise in data modeling and schema design.

• Ensure best practices in data governance, quality, and cleansing.

• Architect and optimize ETL/ELT pipelines for performance.

• Write and enhance complex analytical SQL queries on extensive datasets.

• Develop scripts (Python, shell) to facilitate automation, data loading, and demo environments.

• Deploy and configure Vertica environments across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud settings.

• Diagnose performance issues and enhance query execution in real-time scenarios.

• Collaborate closely with cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), GSIs, VARs, and ISVs to deliver integrated solutions.

• Support co-selling opportunities and align on mutual value propositions.

• Contribute to partner enablement and field readiness.

• Define and advocate for best practices, architectural patterns, and reusable assets within the Solutions Architecture community.

• Impact technical sales strategies, including POC methodologies and competitive positioning frameworks.

• Mentor and coach fellow Solutions Architects and Sales Engineers.

• Act as a technical thought leader, representing Rocket in critical customer and industry engagements.

• Foster innovation in areas such as AI/ML integration, advanced analytics, and cutting-edge data architectures.

⛳️ Requirements

• Over 10 years of experience in solutions architecture, presales, or technical consulting roles.

• At least 3–5 years in a customer-facing presales position, ideally in Data Warehouse or Data Lake analytics.

• Demonstrated expertise with columnar, MPP, or OLAP databases, including: Vertica, Teradata, Greenplum, ClickHouse, or similar.

• Strong command of ANSI SQL and major SQL dialects (PL/SQL, T-SQL, etc.).

• Proficient in query optimization and performance tuning.

• Experience in data modeling and warehouse design (star/snowflake schemas).

• Skilled in ETL/ELT pipeline development and orchestration.

• Knowledge of data governance, data quality, and data cleansing practices.

• Familiarity with streaming and ingestion frameworks: Kafka, Spark.

• Experience with data lake and storage solutions: S3, HDFS.

• Proficient in BI and visualization tools: Tableau, Looker, Power BI.

• Strong understanding of cloud and hybrid environments, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

• Experience in designing and deploying analytical workloads across distributed infrastructures.

• Advanced SQL capabilities for analytical tasks.

• Proficient in Python and/or shell scripting for automation and environment setup.

• Experience in building and maintaining POC/demo environments.

🏝️ Benefits

• Information security is a shared responsibility.

• Commitment to Diversity, Inclusion & Equity at Rocket Software.

• Dedicated to fostering an inclusive workplace.