Sales Architect (Pre-Sales)

About AppGate

AppGate secures and protects an organization's most valuable assets with its high performance Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solution. AppGate ZTNA is the only direct-routed Zero Trust solution built for peak performance, superior protection and seamless interoperability. AppGate safeguards enterprises and government agencies worldwide. Learn more at appgate.com.

In Japan, AppGate also serves major financial institutions and telecom operators with AppGate 360 Fraud Protection, its fraud protection product line. This role supports both product lines, with AppGate ZTNA as the primary focus.

About the Role

As an AppGate ZTNA subject matter expert, the Sales Architect (SA) owns the technical engagement for AppGate's opportunities in Japan across both product lines: AppGate ZTNA, which is the primary focus of the role and of the skills required, and AppGate 360 Fraud Protection. Working from clear and validated customer requirements and an end-state vision, the SA designs, deploys and clearly articulates a solution that fully realizes the customer's requirements, in the customer's language and business context.

The Sales Architect's responsibilities include product demonstrations, technology whiteboard sessions, solution design and configuration, proofs of concept (PoCs) and customer evaluations. The ideal candidate combines strong technical skills with business acumen and a desire to serve as a trusted advisor to customers and partners. The SA works closely with AppGate's Japan sales leadership and with internal business units including Professional Services, Customer Success, Support and Product, and with strategic partners, to propose and implement complex AppGate ZTNA-integrated solutions for large commercial enterprise and public sector customers. The SA also works with the Vice President of Solutions Architecture to help prioritize and define feature enhancements and product requests based on regional customer needs, including production deployments, partner demonstration environments and test platforms on-premises and in private and public cloud.

The APJ market is partner-led. A core part of this role is enabling and co-selling with system integrators and distribution partners: equipping partner engineers to design, demonstrate and deploy AppGate ZTNA, acting as the partner's technical advocate inside AppGate, and representing AppGate as the subject matter expert in joint customer engagements, including both large commercial enterprise accounts and government and defense programs with elevated security requirements.

For AppGate 360 Fraud Protection, the SA serves as the technical Sales Architect for key existing accounts in Japan, including major financial institutions and telecom operators, supports new opportunities by fitting the global Fraud team's solutions to the needs of the Japan market, and represents AppGate in Japan Cybercrime Control Center (JC3) intelligence-exchange and working-group activity.

The Sales Architect is part of the pre-sales organization and is responsible for creating, designing and documenting all proposed architectures derived from customer communications and PoC work, while serving as the primary technical escalation for post-sale delivery teams during deployments. As customers transition from delivery to support and lifecycle services, the SA works with the Customer Success Manager (CSM) to support expansion and retention, and acts as an escalation point for the CSM and Support teams to help troubleshoot break/fix issues before escalation to the Vice President of Solutions Architecture.

Key Responsibilities

• Designs, delivers and supports customer deployment projects of AppGate ZTNA solutions across Japan and APJ.
• Leads technical engagement with Japanese customers and partners in Japanese, and collaborates with AppGate's global teams in English.
• Enables partner (system integrator and distributor) engineering teams: technical training, demo environments, reference architectures and joint PoC execution.
• Serves as AppGate's technical lead in partner-led opportunities with large commercial enterprise accounts and with public sector and defense programs, including environments with security-level segmentation, smart-card and PKI-based identity, and strict data residency requirements.
• Helps drive value and validate the solution to ensure the customer is getting maximum value from AppGate ZTNA.
• Participates in strategic and tactical account and partner planning discussions.
• Provides technical support in presentations, customer success and deployment meetings, trade shows and other forums, including leading in-depth technical requirements sessions.
• Articulates the AppGate value proposition relative to competitors and legacy VPN or cloud-routed ZTNA approaches during evaluations.
• Delivers evaluations and demonstrations against documented technical and business requirements so customers can make design decisions on the proposed solution.
• Develops technical solutions to solve communicated customer use cases, including on-network and remote access, multi-site and multi-tenant designs, and integration with existing SD-WAN, identity and security tooling.
• Produces and localizes technical collateral for the region: architecture documents, PoC plans, test cases, demo scripts and responses to customer questionnaires and RFPs.
• Provides technical, design, presentation and implementation support for new services and upgrades.
• Serves as technical resource to the post-sale delivery team for new customer implementations and acts as their technical escalation point.
• Prepares and presents customer-facing technical presentations regarding AppGate security offerings and customer-specific solutions.
• Participates in Q&A sessions to help prospective customers validate the value of AppGate ZTNA compared to competitive and legacy products.
• Works with customer security teams during red, purple and blue team events for AppGate ZTNA security validation.
• Develops strong relationships with customers, partners, engineering and product teams as a trusted advisor facilitating solution improvements.
• Captures regional requirements and works with the Vice President of Solutions Architecture to drive new features and product requests within the AppGate ZTNA product line.
• Conducts deep-dive technical training on AppGate products and solutions for internal and external stakeholders.
• Leads testing and evaluation of new features, providing feedback to developers and exposing deficiencies so that new feature sets are production-ready.
• AppGate 360 Fraud Protection: acts as the technical Sales Architect for key existing accounts, including major Japanese financial institutions and telecom operators, proactively driving committed expansion-of-use proposals and owning retention and revenue growth from these accounts.
• AppGate 360 Fraud Protection: works new customer opportunities by mapping new fraud solutions from the global Fraud team to Japanese customers, identifying actual customer challenges and building proposals that fit the Japan market.
• AppGate 360 Fraud Protection: drives JC3 intelligence into products and proposals by absorbing JC3 intelligence-exchange technology and working-group output (approximately 10 to 20% of time) and channeling it to the AppGate 360 Fraud Protection product team and into customer proposals.
• Travels regularly within Japan for customer and partner meetings, with occasional international travel.

Required Qualifications

• Fluent in both Japanese and English, written and spoken. Able to translate technical concepts from other AppGate technical professionals into Japanese during live meetings and in writing when required, to run technical workshops with Japanese customers and partners, and to collaborate daily with English-speaking engineering and product teams.
• Japanese citizenship: required for certain government engagements and for JC3 participation, which are subject to national-security-related restrictions on foreign nationals.
• 5 to 15 years of experience as a pre-sales solution architect or sales engineer within the cybersecurity or networking space.
• 5 to 15 years of experience delivering software or network solutions in the cybersecurity or networking space.
• Experience working with and through Japanese system integrators and distributors in a partner-led sales model serving both large commercial enterprise and government and defense customers.
• Experience supporting partners and customers in both the large commercial enterprise market and the government and defense sector, including environments with formal security-level classification, is strongly desired.
• Communicates effectively with security, network and IT operations stakeholders, and with partner engineering and project management teams.
• Familiarity with Zero Trust Network Access concepts and Software Defined Perimeter architecture (desired).
• Familiarity with Single Packet Authorization (desired).
• Familiarity with identity platforms, endpoint security tools, compliance and UEBA, SIEM, SOAR and ITSM.
• Architect-level knowledge and experience designing, articulating and implementing connectivity solutions to public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), including Japan and APJ regions and sovereign or government cloud offerings.
• Architect-level knowledge and experience designing, articulating and implementing complex network integrations and cybersecurity solutions.
• Familiarity with common virtualization technologies such as VMware vSphere, Proxmox, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen and Red Hat OpenStack.
• Familiarity with integration of access solutions with identity providers (for example Active Directory, Keycloak, Entra ID, Okta, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, LDAP, SAML, RADIUS) and MFA technology (for example TOTP, FIDO2, RADIUS), including smart-card and certificate-based user identity.
• Familiarity with systems integration and workflow automation using REST APIs, JavaScript and JSON within an API-first, Security-as-Code architecture (highly desired).
• Ability to build and troubleshoot REST API integrations with external systems, including identity, ITSM, logging, NGFW and security platforms (highly desired).
• Direct experience with scripting, including RESTful APIs and JavaScript, with a strong understanding of RESTful API design and JSON data models (highly desired).
• Design and implementation of Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and Ansible (desired).
• Configuration as Code and GitOps workflows, and integration of Zero Trust deployments into CI/CD pipelines aligned with DevSecOps practices (desired).
• Familiarity with process frameworks such as ITIL or ITSM.
• Architect-level familiarity with network security solutions such as firewalls and next-generation firewalls, network access control and VPNs, logging and syslog integration, IT operations, IT security operations, SD-WAN, WAN and other Layer 3 and Layer 4 network technology.
• Current CCNP, CCIE or equivalent networking certification, or equivalent demonstrated experience.
• Architect-level familiarity with IP routing, VPN systems, encryption using TLS, DTLS and mTLS, SSH, certificate signing and authentication, ARP and proxy ARP, network segmentation and micro-segmentation, and ACL and firewall rulesets.
• Holder of a current certificate of competency from a major public cloud provider (for example AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate) (desired).
• Familiarity with authentication protocols and services such as Active Directory, LDAP, RADIUS, Kerberos and SAML, and with machine certificate-based authentication, PKI trust chains, certificate lifecycle and revocation.
• Familiarity with encryption standards such as AES, PKI and RSA, and with FIPS 140-3 and Common Criteria validated cryptography as it applies to government, defense and regulated enterprise customers.
• Experience with compliance engineering in support of frameworks relevant to the region, such as ISMAP, FISC Security Guidelines, ISO/IEC 27001, NIST SP 800-207 Zero Trust Architecture and the Japan Ministry of Defense security standards, is strongly desired.
• Regular travel within Japan for customer and partner meetings; occasional international travel is required.

Travel

• Travel requirements

AppGate is An Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer and a federal contractor subject to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 as amended, and their corresponding regulations. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability or veteran status, age or any other federally protected class.  Further, AppGate is an affirmative action employer committed to taking positive steps to employ, advance in employment and otherwise afford equal employment opportunity to protected veterans and individuals with disabilities.  In furtherance of AppGate’s policy regarding affirmative action and equal employment opportunity, AppGate has developed a written affirmative action program. This program is available for review upon request by any applicant or employee during normal business hours by contacting the company’s EEO Coordinator. www.appgate.com/careers