Business Area:
Sales Operations
Seniority Level:
Mid-Senior level
Job Description:
At Cloudera, we empower people to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. With as much data under management as the hyperscalers, we're the preferred data partner for the top companies in almost every industry. Powered by the relentless innovation of the open source community, Cloudera advances digital transformation for the world’s largest enterprises.
The Technical Enablement team at Cloudera is the engine behind our field’s competitive edge. We don't just deliver training; we architect the frameworks that transform complex data product capabilities into field-ready value propositions. As the Senior Director of Global Sales Technical Field Enablement, you will be a critical executive leader responsible for building, scaling, and leading the global organization that drives technical readiness across our Solution Engineering and other customer facing organizations.
Reporting directly to the VP of Global Sales Enablement, you will own the end-to-end technical readiness lifecycle. You will lead a high-performing team of enablement managers and strategists, acting as the strategic liaison between executive leadership in Product Engineering, Marketing, and Sales to ensure our technical sellers are elite consultants capable of navigating the most complex enterprise data architectures.
Strategic Responsibilities
Global Organizational Leadership & Scale
- Build & Lead the Team: Recruit, mentor, and develop a world-class global team of technical enablement managers and instructional designers. Foster a high-performance culture aligned with Cloudera's strategic growth.
- Budget & Resource Management: Own the global budget for technical enablement, including software vendor management (LMS, lab environments) and external content partnerships. Ensure maximum ROI on enablement spend.
Executive Stakeholder & Strategy Realization
- Sales Alignment: Partner directly with the VPs and SVPs of Worldwide Sales, Solution Engineering, and Product Management to diagnose global skill gaps, align on corporate KPIs, and deploy targeted enablement interventions.
- Product-to-Field Pipeline: Serve as the executive bridge to Product Engineering. Ensure your team transforms roadmap features into comprehensive, "Value-Based Technical Demo" frameworks that articulate how Cloudera beats the competition at an architectural level.
Governance & Competency Frameworks
- Global Certification Ownership: Design, govern, and scale a sophisticated, role-based technical competency matrix. Own the global "Certification" strategy that validates the field’s ability to execute high-stakes technical validations (PoCs) and architectural designs.
- Onboarding & Time-to-Value: Standardize and evolve the "First 90 Days" technical journey globally. Move beyond completion metrics to directly impact executive KPIs: Time-to-First-Deal and Technical Proficiency Benchmarks.
Enablement Innovation
- Tech Stack & AI Transformation: Champion and fund next-generation learning modalities. Drive the adoption of AI-driven coaching tools, automated advanced lab environments, and "just-in-time" enablement triggers tied to CRM data.
Qualifications & Experience
- Experience: 12+ years of experience in Technical Sales, Sales Engineering, or Technical Enablement within the Big Data, Cloud, or SaaS space, with at least 5+ years of direct people management experience leading global, multi-tiered teams.
- Leadership Track Record: Proven success leading enablement or technical pre-sales organizations through massive corporate transformations (e.g., shifting a global field team from legacy on-premise to Hybrid Cloud/SaaS selling models).
- Executive Presence: Exceptional communication skills with a proven track record of influencing, challenging, and collaborating with C-suite stakeholders, VPs, and external partners.
- Deep Technical Fluency: Ability to "speak engineer" and command respect from highly technical teams. Strong conceptual understanding of data lifecycles, Kubernetes, Cloudera/Hadoop ecosystems, and hyperscale cloud providers (AWS/Azure/GCP).
- Data-Driven Revenue Mapping: Expert ability to correlate enablement investments with hard revenue outcomes (e.g., Win Rates, Deal Cycle compression, ACV growth).
Preferred Requirements
- Education: MBA or a Master’s degree in a technical or business discipline preferred.
- Tech Stack Governance: Experience architecting and managing an enterprise enablement stack at scale (e.g., Mindtickle, Highspot, Salesforce, Tableau, PowerBI).
- Architectural Certification: Active or historical high-level certifications (e.g., AWS Solutions Architect Professional, GCP Professional Data Engineer, or similar).
What you can expect from us:
Generous PTO Policy
Support work life balance with Unplugged Days
Flexible WFH Policy
Mental & Physical Wellness programs
Phone and Internet Reimbursement program
Access to Continued Career Development
Comprehensive Benefits and Competitive Packages
Paid Volunteer Time
Employee Resource Groups
EEO/VEVRAA
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