Manager, Systems Engineering - Strategics Accounts

Company Description

Our Mission

At Palo Alto Networks® everything starts and ends with our mission:

Being the cybersecurity partner of choice, protecting our digital way of life.

Our vision is a world where each day is safer and more secure than the one before. We are a company built on the foundation of challenging and disrupting the way things are done, and we’re looking for innovators who are as committed to shaping the future of cybersecurity as we are.

FLEXWORK is an employee-centric reimagining of how we work. We built FLEXWORK based on employee feedback – it is about flexibility, trust, and choice whenever possible. It’s been a journey of disruption that has yielded the best of our values. We offer as much flexibility as possible, and choices that enable you to be most productive, including benefits that meet your needs and learning opportunities that you feel passionate about.

Job Description

Your Career

As our Systems Engineer Manager, you are the technical leader for your District Systems Engineering team. You will work closely with the District Sales Manager and, along with your team, build relationships with your customers with the goal of helping them detect and prevent advanced cyberattacks and breaches. Our customers need guidance on what applications to deploy from our platform. Your guidance, expertise, and mentorship of your team of SEs will keep them ahead of the latest cyberthreats and staying on the leading edge of prevention. 

We are looking for a leader to develop our sales teams, providing training and technical support as a product expert. Additionally, you will provide feedback to the product management team on new feature requests and product improvements based on what you learn from your customer base. Your team, in partnership with the sales account managers, will displace competitor technologies and build market share within your targeted list of major accounts, and most importantly, help your client sleep at night as they use our products to build secure digital transactions. 

We expect office-based employees to be in the office four days per week, with one day working from where they choose. We believe being together facilitates casual conversations and those magic moments where we can work on issues and ideas informally. These moments build capability and deepen trusted relationships and allow our people to feel safe in taking risks and being disruptive. Like so many companies, we are working through the details and things could change …. but in general if a role is deemed office-based we want our teams to be together four days per week.

Your Impact

• Recruit and hire new systems engineers into the territory, hiring the best talent in the industry
• Responsible to train, mentor, and review employees on your team, keeping them engaged and successful in their careers 
• Support field systems engineer team in complex evaluations, problem-solving and challenging customer environments
• Define and create an updated system engineering training curriculum
• Develop relationships with channel partners and their technical teams to ensure colleagues are appropriately trained and can support our installations
• Provide effective technical leadership in customer interactions to include sharing security trends and standard methodologies employed by other customers to actively be part of the selling process
• Act as a floating systems engineer and fill in for existing team members if there is a resource conflict or vacation coverage challenge
• Act as an escalation point for pre-sales and post-sales technical issues that arise 
• Build and maintain relationships with key customers to solidify reference accounts and to assist the account teams with defining plans to drive more business
• Present to customers as our expert in your area at all levels in the customer hierarchy from technician to CIO
• Lead conversations about industry trends and emerging changes to the security landscape that every customer needs to plan for 
• Discuss competitor products in the marketplace and positions ours as the best alternative
• Working with Product Management, Technical Marketing, and R&D to build requirements and product features for our large customers and provide feedback from customers 
• Provide design consultation and standard methodology mentorship for rollout, implementation, and policy conversion during the 'pre-sales' process for strategic opportunities
• Ownership of advanced 'proof of concept' testing in strategic accounts either at the customer site or our lab facilities
• Provide advanced 'Partner SE' training for updates in our product suite
• Maintain a general understanding of competitor selling strategies
• 50-75% travel within the region