The posting
We're looking to looking to hire a VP of Systems Engineer - West Coast!
VAST Data creating a new category of infrastructure: the Operating System for AI. We’re unifying storage, database, compute, and data services into a single platform designed to power the world’s most demanding AI and data environments. As we build this category, we’re looking for a Vice President of Systems Engineering – West to lead and scale the technical organization bringing VAST’s vision to the world’s most sophisticated enterprises and AI customers.
This is a second-line leadership role responsible for developing SE leaders, building a world-class technical organization, and partnering with Sales to drive VAST’s growth across the Western U.S.
The Role
The VP of Systems Engineering – West is a second-line leadership position, responsible for leading SE managers and their teams across the region.
This leader will own the technical strategy and execution of the West business, partner closely with regional Sales leadership, and build an SE organization capable of winning the most sophisticated enterprise and AI infrastructure opportunities in the market.
This is not an administrative leadership role.
We’re looking for a builder of technical organizations—someone who can develop exceptional first-line leaders, raise the technical and commercial bar across the organization, and remain credible enough to personally engage in VAST’s most strategic and technically complex opportunities.
The right leader can operate at multiple altitudes: developing managers, shaping regional strategy, advising executives, and going deep with architects and engineering teams when the opportunity demands it.
What You’ll Do
- Lead the Systems Engineering organization across the Western U.S., managing, coaching, and developing first-line SE leaders and their teams.
- Build a strong leadership bench, ensuring SE managers are capable of recruiting exceptional talent, developing their people, and creating consistently high-performing teams.
- Partner with West Sales leadership to define regional strategy, prioritize accounts, build pipeline, and win significant net-new customers.
- Establish a high bar across the organization for technical discovery, full-stack solution architecture, competitive positioning, POCs, executive engagement, and technical deal execution.
- Stay actively engaged in VAST’s largest and most strategic opportunities, particularly where complex architecture, executive alignment, or competitive differentiation can determine the outcome.
- Develop an organization that can engage credibly with sophisticated customers across AI infrastructure, cloud, financial services, technology, media, life sciences, and large enterprise environments.
- Coach SE leaders and their teams to move beyond product demonstrations and feature discussions toward understanding customer problems and architecting solutions tied to meaningful business outcomes.
- Create strong partnerships across Sales, Product, Engineering, CTO Office, Alliances, Customer Success, and Support.
- Develop repeatable technical sales motions that allow the West organization to scale without sacrificing technical quality.
- Create a culture of accountability, intellectual curiosity, technical excellence, customer obsession, and continuous development.
Requirements
- Significant leadership experience within Systems Engineering, Solutions Engineering, Field Architecture, or technical pre-sales organizations.
- Proven second-line leadership experience, including directly managing and developing SE managers and building organizations through those leaders.
- Demonstrated success building and scaling high-performing technical field organizations in enterprise infrastructure, data platforms, cloud, or AI.
- A strong track record supporting teams that create and win net-new business, particularly within strategic and complex enterprise accounts.
- Experience operating in high-growth environments where leaders are expected to build teams, processes, and culture rather than inherit mature organizations.
- Deep full-stack technical credibility across modern data and AI infrastructure: strong understanding of distributed storage and data architectures; file and object protocols including NFS, SMB, and S3; NVMe/NVMe-oF; high-performance networking including Ethernet, RDMA/RoCE, and InfiniBand; Linux; Kubernetes and containers; cloud platforms; and modern GPU infrastructure including NVIDIA and AMD.
- Strong working knowledge of the modern data and AI ecosystem, including technologies such as Spark, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Trino, Kafka, GPU infrastructure, and large-scale AI training and inference environments.
- Ability to reason across the entire technology stack—compute, networking, storage, data platforms, and AI infrastructure—and challenge senior SEs and architects on architecture, performance, scalability, and design tradeoffs.
- Strong executive presence with the ability to engage CIOs, CTOs, infrastructure leaders, AI leaders, architects, and deeply technical engineering organizations.
- Ability to translate architectural differentiation into business outcomes and communicate why VAST matters, not simply how the technology works.
- Strong understanding of solution selling and the ability to coach an organization through discovery, technical qualification, competitive engagements, and complex sales cycles.
- Experience recruiting and attracting exceptional technical talent in highly competitive markets.
- Ability to travel throughout the Western U.S. as required.
