Solutions Engineer

Position Title: Solutions Engineer

Location: Chicago, IL / Santa Clara, CA

Your role

This position offers you the opportunity to join the world's leading data center experts and design solutions for a wide range of customers.

• Join the world's largest data center provider.

• Work with top-tier customers on diverse projects.

• Broaden your knowledge across portfolio management, design, construction, operations, and more.

• Collaborate with industry leaders in a high-growth environment.

Digital Realty's Solutions & Design Engineering team is a global team providing sales-focused engineering services to our front-line sellers as we help our end users solve business problems with technology. As the industry leader with more than 300 locations across the world, you'll be involved in understanding a customer's technical requirements, documenting them, developing, and designing solutions using Digital Realty's products and services, and presenting solutions to the end user in conjunction with Sales.

What you'll do

You will support the sales team in technical sales solutions in your region and be involved almost from the beginning of any sale. You need to develop strong working relationships with the Portfolio Management, Operations, Design and Construction teams. At any given time, you will be contributing to multiple sales efforts at various stages with an emphasis on the colocation business. While it can vary, a typical sales cycle looks like this:

• Support sales teams in technical sales and solutions in all markets.

• Direct engagements by acting as a subject matter expert related to the infrastructure, nuances, and challenges associated with assigned buildings.

• Serve as the primary responder for all customer RFPs.

• Evaluate customer needs, and then design and present a preliminary solution.

• Support the Solutions Architecture team on the opportunity and develop the physical requirements to implement the solution.

• Conduct a tour of one of our data centers, providing technical information.

• Act as the primary input channel for Operations from the Sales teams.

• Develop cost-engineering and profitability models for large customer opportunities.

• Support Design and Construction teams in regional markets and provide input, support, and essential "local knowledge" for construction projects.

• You'll support lease negotiations by (1) interpreting the lease to ensure the terms match with the technical specs and (2) supporting pricing efforts, including estimating move-in, power, materials, and other costs.

• Once the lease is signed you will coordinate the transition to our post-sale implementation team to build what you've designed for your customer.

• Participate in forecasting, pipeline, and market analysis.

• Liaise with the professional community, including attending technical forums and presenting papers at industry events.

• Monitor and evaluate trends in customer and target tenant base.

You will spend a good deal of time out in the field. You can also expect to be called upon to support data centers in other markets as needed. Most travel will involve day trips, but you should be prepared to travel overnight about 25% of the time.

What you'll need

To be a good fit for this opportunity you have the following skills and experience:

• Demonstrated customer-facing and sales engineering skills, with the ability to engage directly with customers, understand their technical needs (specifically around power, cooling, and connectivity), and effectively guide and sell Platform Digital solutions.

• Demonstrated project management expertise with a knack for translating big-picture visions into detailed specifications, analyzing complex documents, and applying standards and rigorous tracking to ensure project success. Excellent organizational skills and a keen attention to detail are essential.

• Strong proficiency in MS Office (Word, Excel), and Adobe Acrobat are essential.

• Strong proficiency in Visio, AutoCAD, and CFD modeling is preferred.

• 3-5 years of solid experience in a B2B sales environment, preferably in data center, telecommunications, networking, hosting, high-tech facilities, or related fields.

You will also have the following soft skills:

• A strong commitment to delivering excellent customer service to customers and co-workers.

• Learn and apply new technical and business concepts and skills quickly to adapt to customers' needs and enhance customer satisfaction.

• Effectively respond, verbally or in writing, to sensitive issues, complex inquiries, or complaints to foster team collaboration and enhance customer satisfaction.

• Make effective presentations and respond to questions from groups of managers, clients, customers, and the public.

• Work well under pressure and take a proactive approach to unusual occurrences, to drive successful outcomes under pressure.

Other experience that is helpful, but not required:

• A bachelor's degree, ideally in an analytical field like engineering.

• Product management experience in the IT infrastructure industry.

• Consulting experience in the areas of IT, networking, or data centers.

This description is intended to give you a general overview of the position and is not an exhaustive listing of duties and responsibilities.

A bit about us

Digital Realty brings companies and data together by delivering the full spectrum of data center, colocation and interconnection solutions. PlatformDIGITAL, the company's global data center platform, provides customers with a secure data meeting place and a proven Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx) solution methodology for powering innovation and efficiently managing Data Gravity challenges. Digital Realty gives its customers access to the connected data communities that matter to them with a global data center footprint of 300+ facilities in 50+ metros across 25+ countries on six continents.

To learn more about Digital Realty, please visit