Pre-Sales Engineer

NextSiliconNextSilicon is a swiftly growing unicorn startup that is reimagining high-performance computing. Our pioneering coprocessor vastly accelerates supercomputers, driving them forward into a new generation. Our new software-defined hardware architecture enables HPC and AI to fulfill its promise of breakthroughs in all fields of advanced research.

At NextSilicon, everything we do is guided by three core values:

• Professionalism: We strive for exceptional results through professionalism and unwavering dedication to quality and performance. 
• Unity: Collaboration is key to success. That's why we foster a work environment where every employee can feel valued and heard. 
• Impact: We're passionate about developing technologies that make a meaningful impact on industries, communities, and individuals worldwide.

As we are preparing the launch of our 2nd and 3rd generation of accelerators we are strengthening our technical field sales support to help identify and qualify opportunities for our technology in different industry verticals as well as governmental and academic institutions in the American markets, pre-dominantly, but not exclusively, in the United States and Canada.

We are looking for an experienced HPC and AI application field support engineer to join our newly formed pre-sales engineering team. The ideal candidate brings already a broad work experience in different application areas (CFD, FEM, MD, Weather/Climate, QM, AI models, …) to port, benchmark and optimize applications for different types of high performance computing technologies (CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, etc). While strong hands-on work experience is a requirement, the candidate must have excellent communication skills, both orally and in writing, when discussing advantages of our unique approach to accelerating computing workloads to our customers and when gathering and summarizing new customer requirements for our research and development teams. 

You will closely collaborate with sales and business development teams to identify and qualify new opportunities, leverage and grow your already existing client networks to help foster growth in our opportunity pipeline, formulate and justify new requirements for next generations of our hardware and software stack, liaise closely with technical experts and decision makers of our existing and potential customer base and provide consulting on how to maximize value from our technology for their specific use cases, conduct and lead performance studies, code porting and proof-of-concepts with our application support team and assist our sales partners in delivering winning proposals.

Location: Minneapolis, MN preferred but Remote considered for the right candidate

Travel: Ability and willingness to travel up to 40% predominantly in North-America, occasionally internationally, is required

• Bachelor of Science in an engineering discipline (computer science, mathematics, natural sciences or engineering) with a significant focus on scientific computing
• master or Ph.D. with relevant specialization is a plus
• At least 8 years of work experience in the field, of which at least 4 years should be in the commercial sector
• if work experience is highly relevant to the field, supported by an excellent track record (e.g. publications), those with less years would be considered
• Practical work experience with at least two computing architectures (CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, vector processors, …) is required
• Practical expertise in at least two application areas is required (finite element methods, computational fluid dynamics, molecular dynamics, high-energy or astro physics, quantum chemistry, weather/climate simulations, AI training & inference frameworks)
• Experience in at least two industry verticals are strongly desired (government, academic, finance, oil & gas, manufacturing, telecommunication, engineering or logistics)
• A strong parallel programming experience using both MPI and OpenMP is required
• A strong C/C++ and Fortran background is required
• Fortran experience can be less, but willingness to learn and expand is required
• UNIX (Linux) and shell programming experience is required
• Python programming is a plus
• Good presentation skills and soft skills in working with customers are essential
• Strong technical writing skills are important(presentations, whitepapers, blogs, …)
• Examples of peer-reviewed publications are a plus

As a professional you are highly self-motivated and results driven. There you are actively setting and pursuing weekly goals for yourself that assist in achieving your objectives:

• Maintain and foster existing and create new contacts with clients, actively looking for new opportunities
• Initiate, organize and lead proof-of-concept, benchmarking and code porting projects to win new business
• Gather and qualify new important customer requirements; document and discuss them with product management and engineering 
• Providing competitive market insights and guidance to sales and engineering teams
• Assist our partners in finding both standard and innovative answers to technical requirements and questions in proposals and help in providing concise descriptions and compelling value propositions to be included in their proposals
• Assess and mitigate technology risks for our clients and our company 
• Present the value of our technology for different use cases in front of customers
• Actively work and contribute towards achieving our sales targets and other KPIs
• Actively report your activities and discuss your plans with your peers and management team
• Grow your area of expertise (new classes of applications and market verticals, competitor awareness, new methodologies and relevant technical frameworks, familiarization with NextSilicons technologies.