PALO ALTO NETWORKS® is the fastest-growing security company in history.  We offer the chance to be part of an important mission: ending breaches and protecting our way of digital life. If you are a motivated, intelligent, creative, and hardworking individual, then this job is for you!

As a Palo Alto Networks Pre-Sales Systems Engineer, you are an important member of the technical sales team, identifying complex security challenges in your customers’ networks and driving solutions with Palo Alto Networks’ market leading security products and services.  

You are the technical sales representative of the company and must ensure full customer satisfaction with all that you do. You and your sales partner own the customer relationship and your goal is to help them detect and prevent advanced cyberattacks and breaches while safely enabling applications by deploying the full Palo Alto Networks platform so that they can confidently pursue network, cloud, and mobile technology initiatives.

You bring a mature and experienced SE capability to Palo Alto Networks and have the ability to leverage all assets of our company, from support, to professional services, to product management, to engineering, to our executives.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Effectively lead conversations about Palo Alto Networks security platform and solutions.

• Create and deliver compelling demonstrations of Palo Alto Networks products and solutions that clearly differentiates us from competitors or legacy security solutions.

• Educate customers and partners on the modern network security landscape.

• Identify and qualify new opportunities, and support technical pre-sales activities to opportunity closure.

• Proactively expand the Palo Alto Networks install base within existing accounts.

• Maintain key partner technical relationships and effectively enable and leverage channel partners; Excel in a channel-driven sales model.

• Create evaluation test plans with customers that highlight the strengths of Palo Alto Networks platform and clearly differentiate us from competitors, and manage the evaluation process to a successful conclusion.

• Gather customer technical requirements and identify product and technology gaps.

• Understand and effectively differentiate from competitive technologies and solutions.

• Understand and assist customers through the support escalation process, helping manage support escalations with the customer to closure, if necessary.

• Continuously strive for self-improvement and learning to maintain current technical knowledge, and actively share knowledge and technical experience with the broader team.

• Actively participates in technical communities of interest and focus on certain technologies.

• Technical competence: Understands all Palo Alto Networks products; understands competitive technologies; technical expertise and experience on some technologies; Continuous technical development.

• Agenda setting: Effectively adapts Palo Alto Networks value proposition and vision for network security based on customer requirements; Proficient in identifying problems in customer environments and leading conversations in the direction of Palo Alto Networks' solutions; Maintains strong relationships with customers at field and technical management levels, and effectively engages at senior technical and management levels.

• Professional skills: Consistently meets all expectations in customer facing engagements, and excels in writing, presentation, and creative problem solving skills; demonstrates continued development and experience; maintains a very professional reputation with customers and channel partners.

• Attitude: Consistently takes responsibility for own actions; self-motivated and proactive in all engagements; consistently exhibits a positive attitude and demonstrates a “whatever-it-takes” mentality to get things done; dependable, never makes excuses, and always delivers.

• Teamwork: Works extremely well with the immediate team and channel partners and can coordinate productive engagement with the product, marketing team, and other members of the extended team; A consummate team player.

• Experience and established success as an Systems Engineer, or demonstrable equivalent industry experience.

• Extensive domestic travel within the territory is often required, and international travel may be required as necessary.

• Ideal candidates will have prior experience selling network infrastructure based security appliances including, but not limited to: Firewalls, SSL/IPSec VPNs, Security Proxies and Caches.

• Candidates should have practical experience working with routing and switching products that will be installed adjacent to the Palo Alto Networks appliances.

• Strong communication (written and verbal) and presentation skills, both internally and externally.

• Strong problem solving skills, ability to analyze complex multivariate problems and use a systematic approach to gain quick resolution, often under duress.

• Mature and effective organizational and time-management skills.

 QUALIFICATIONS:

• BSCS or equivalent and 6+ years of experience as an SE or Systems Integrator.
• Demonstrable experience with systems installation, configuration and administration of routers/switches, UNIX/Linux and Windows-based systems (prior Active Directory/LDAP experience desirable).
• Experience that emphasizes L2-L4 Networking (L2 Switching architectures including Spanning Tree, IP routing including OSPF and BGP, L4 Load-balancing).
• Industry knowledge of security and network product and technology trends.
• Knowledge of competitive solutions and selling strategies.
• Experience selling, demonstrating, installing and/or troubleshooting network infrastructure security products.

Experience with, or knowledge of, modern network threats and malware.

• Experience with, or knowledge of, network forensics and incident response.
• Relevant Palo Alto Networks certification – eg PCSNE, PSE, ACE, etc.
• Relevant industry certifications – eg. SANS, CISSP, CCIE, etc.

Learn more about Palo Alto Networks here and check out our fast facts