Customer Solutions Architect

About this role

This role focuses on winning new customers. The CSA leads the technical work in new logo sales cycles: understanding the prospect's environment, designing the right architecture, and running proof-of-concepts that give prospects confidence in Teradata.

The competition in APJ is active. Prospects are evaluating Snowflake, Databricks, IBM, Oracle, Cloudera, Open-source, and cloud-native alternatives. This CSA needs to understand those platforms, know where Teradata performs better, and be able to demonstrate that difference clearly.

Won opportunities will transition to the Enterprise CSA team. The Hunter role owns the technical cycle from first contact through to commercial decision, then hands off a well-documented customer environment to the account team.

Why this role is worth taking

You will run the technical side of Teradata's most competitive sales situations in APJ. Every engagement is a genuine competition with measurable outcomes. You will build a PoC library and competitive playbook that shapes how the region wins business, and your contribution will be visible in new logo numbers. For someone who wants to operate at the sharp end of enterprise technical sales, this is that role.

Key responsibilities

Technical work in new business pursuits

• Lead the technical side of new logo sales cycles including discovery, architecture design, competitive positioning, and solution validation.
• Run structured technical discovery sessions to understand the prospect's current environment, pain points, and requirements.
• Prepare and present architecture/solution proposals that address the prospect's specific needs and show clearly how Teradata fits.
• Address competitive questions with specific, evidence-based responses, particularly where prospects are also evaluating competitive options.

Proof-of-concept and technical validation

• Design and run proof-of-concepts and benchmarks using the prospect's actual workloads and representative data, not generic test cases.
• Manage all steps of the PoC: environment setup, test design, execution, results review, and presentation to stakeholders.
• Set up sandbox environments on Teradata that allow prospects to test the platform directly.
• Present PoC results in a format that supports commercial decision-making at the final stages of a sales cycle.
• Demonstrate Compute Engine and Elastic Compute capabilities to prospects evaluating workload scaling, cost efficiency, and resource separation on Teradata Cloud/Hybrid environments.

Pipeline and field contribution

• Work with the sales team on account targeting, identifying prospects where Teradata's technical profile aligns with the customer's data platform requirements.
• Build reusable materials including reference architectures, competitive summaries, and PoC frameworks.
• Participate in prospect briefings, industry events, and field marketing activity across APJ.
• Document and communicate product feedback, capability gaps, and field observations from customer engagements to Teradata product and engineering teams.

What we are looking for

Experience

• 8 or more years in presales or solution architecture with a focus on new business and competitive sales cycles.
• A track record of contributing to new logo wins: PoCs completed, competitive deals closed, and technical evaluations won.
• Practical experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and knowledge of cloud-native and hybrid cloud data platforms.
• New business experience in APJ, across one or more of Australia, Japan, ASEAN, Korea, or Taiwan.

Technical knowledge

• Good working knowledge of data platform architecture including parallel processing, data lakehouse patterns, streaming data ingestion, and query performance benchmarking.
• Working knowledge of Teradata compute architecture including Compute Engine and Elastic Compute, sufficient to position workload scaling and resource separation during technical evaluations.
• Knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture: how it works, when it applies, and how to explain it to a customer audience without technical shorthand.
• Familiarity with vector store concepts including embedding models and similarity search, and how vector databases connect to large language model workflows in enterprise environments.
• Has used AI Studio or a comparable platform in a customer demo or PoC context and can position Enterprise Vector Store against specific customer use cases.
• Able to design and deliver a rigorous PoC within the timeframes and constraints typical of a competitive sales cycle.
• Practical SQL and Python skills for working in live technical environments in front of prospect teams.
• Knows the competitive landscape: Snowflake, Databricks, Cloudera, IBM, Oracle, Open-source and Google BigQuery, and where Teradata has a stronger case.

Sales process and sizing

• Good understanding of the enterprise sales process: opportunity qualification, technical scoping, solution sizing, configuration, and the broader ecosystem of partners and integrations.
• Ability to size platform requirements based on customer workload characteristics including data volumes, query concurrency, and performance targets.
• Familiarity with how Teradata licensing and consumption models work, sufficient to support accurate quoting and commercial scoping conversations.

Communication and stakeholder engagement

• Confident and clear presenter to both technical teams and senior executives.
• Addresses competitor claims accurately and without overstatement.
• Writes clearly for architecture/solution proposals, PoC summary documents, and RFP technical responses.

Domain knowledge (preferred)

• Financial services: knows how FSI firms in APJ evaluate and procure data platforms, including the regulatory compliance, risk infrastructure, and customer analytics drivers that typically shape those decisions.
• Retail and consumer goods: familiar with how retailers assess data platform needs during a procurement, including real-time inventory, personalisation, and supply chain data requirements.
• Public sector and government: understands government procurement structures and data sovereignty regulations in APJ, and the analytics use cases that drive platform decisions in public sector organisations.
• Manufacturing and supply chain: aware of operational analytics requirements in manufacturing environments, including production data, supply chain visibility, and quality analytics, and how these shape sizing and architecture decisions.

Qualifications

• Degree in computer science, software engineering, mathematics, data science, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience in a technical sales role.

What good looks like at 12 months

• Technical contribution to at least three new logo pursuit cycles, with at least one resulting in a closed deal.
• A working PoC framework built and documented for at least one industry vertical in APJ.
• Reusable materials in active use by the broader APJ/World-wide Field Technology team.
• A clear reputation within the team as the resource to bring in on competitive technical situations.

Reporting and team structure

Solid line to the CSA Director for the assigned territory or region.

Dotted line to the POD Sales Lead responsible for that territory or region.

The role operates within a POD structure: a small cross-functional group of sales, presales, and customer success professionals aligned to a defined set of accounts or a market segment. The CSA is the primary technical voice within the POD and works closely with the Sales Lead on commercial priorities and with the CSA Director on technical direction, career development, and cross-territory alignment.

About Teradata

Teradata is the trusted AI and Knowledge Platform that connects data, business context, and AI so organisations can move from insight to real-time action across cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. We work directly with many of the world's largest enterprises,  including 10 of the top 10 global banks, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and the public sector. In APJ, we work directly with some of the region's largest enterprises across banking, manufacturing, retail, and the public sector

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