Sr. Manager, Specialist Solutions Architect

The Specialist Solutions Architect Sr. Manager will lead a team of Specialist Solutions Architects (SSAs) responsible for key elements of the technical sales cycle. You will grow and develop a dynamic team with expertise in areas including enterprise software, data engineering, and data science/machine learning, who will continue to deepen their knowledge of Databricks as the platform expands. You will guide and get involved to enhance your team's effectiveness; be an expert at communicating complex, business value-focused solutions; support complex sales cycles and customer architectures; and build relationships with key stakeholders in large corporations.

The SSA Team is engaged in our most important and complex customer engagements, providing deep technical expertise to both new and existing customers. Your team provides specialist expertise to the Solution Architect (SA) and Sales teams, which are responsible for developing and overseeing the overall technical account strategy. 

The impact you will have:

• You will hire, train, and grow a diverse team of Specialist Solutions Architects for Databricks, a company in hyper-growth mode
• Exceed your region's consumption targets - by working with your cross-functional counterparts to determine where to deploy your team of technical experts to drive the most critical use cases forward
• Make your customers extremely successful with Databricks and provide outsized value to their businesses
• Establish relationships across the business to make your customers and team successful
• Grow Databricks platform usage and prevent churn in strategic accounts by overseeing and retiring a regional growth quota
• Create positive morale for the team and help foster a working relationship between Field Engineering, Sales, and other important internal partners
• Help resolve customer questions and concerns on accounts and opportunities deemed strategic by Sales and Pre-sales field leadership
• Act in a supportive manager capacity, including handling escalations, mentoring team members, building a career path for the assigned team members, etc.

What we look for:

• Experience in senior roles in the data space with a technical product (i.e. data warehousing, big data, or machine learning)
• Experience in leading technical overlay customer-facing teams (team sizes greater than 8), preferably in a pre-sales organisation leading technical engagements
• Trusted advisor to technical executives that guide strategic data infrastructure decisions
• Team player, but able to challenge and define priorities
• Self-starter, challenger, strategic planner & analytical thinker 
• Lead a team through best practices for technical qualification, proof of concepts, architecture discussions, and product demonstrations
• Experience hiring qualified candidates, ramping them up to be successful, and promoting into larger roles.
• Experience working with other teams such as Sales, Product Management, and Professional Services