Job Summary

The DataPelago Account Executive will own the full enterprise sales cycle, from creating pipeline and winning new customers to closing paid contracts and expanding adoption across strategic accounts. This is a hands-on, quota-carrying hunter role, not a traditional installed-base or account-management position. 

The Account Executive will cultivate target accounts, uncover high-value workloads and business problems, identify technical champions and economic decision-makers, and create urgency where budgets or buying processes may not yet exist. Working with Solution Architects and engineering, the AE will establish proof-of-concept (PoC) engagements using representative customer applications and environments, with clear success criteria and commercial next steps. The AE owns customer alignment and commercial progress while technical teams lead execution. 

The role works closely with DataPelago's team, and NetApp Account Executives to develop both independently sourced and jointly identified opportunities. Successful candidates will turn initial wins into wider adoption across workloads and business units while helping build a repeatable enterprise sales motion. 

Location: Raleigh, North Carolina

About DataPelago and NetApp 

DataPelago is building a new data-processing platform applying accelerated computing for the AI era. Its technology is designed to accelerate analytics and AI workloads by bringing high-performance compute closer to enterprise data. 

Following its acquisition by NetApp, DataPelago combines the ownership, pace, and influence of an early-stage company with NetApp's global customer reach, resources, and enterprise relationships. DataPelago will continue operating with a focused, startup-style model while it builds a scalable business and go-to-market motion. 

This is a zero-to-one environment. We are looking for builders who are energized by ambiguity, move quickly, work directly with customers, and take ownership beyond traditional role boundaries. The strongest candidates will ideally bring experience from both early-stage companies and established organizations. They will know how to build with speed while also creating the processes, partnerships, and operating discipline needed to scale successfully within a larger enterprise. 

Job Responsibilities

• Independently create and qualify a pipeline of net-new enterprise opportunities through targeted prospecting, account research, executive relationships, partners, and NetApp collaboration. 
• Cultivate strategic accounts; map technical champions, platform owners, influencers, economic buyers, and decision-makers across the customer organization. 
• Lead customer discovery to understand real applications, data architectures, workloads, performance bottlenecks, infrastructure costs, and business priorities. 
• Build compelling business cases that connect technical outcomes to measurable customer value and establish a credible path to purchasing decisions. 
• Structure PoCs with Solution Architects and customer teams, defining representative production-like workloads, success criteria, environment needs, milestones, stakeholders, and decision timelines. 
• Own customer engagement and momentum during PoCs; coordinate with Solution Architects and engineering to resolve issues, assess results, and align technical findings with commercial objectives. 
• Convert successful technical evaluations into paid contracts; lead pricing discussions, procurement, negotiations, and deal closure. 
• Drive land-and-expand growth by leveraging initial wins, customer champions, and measurable outcomes to identify additional workloads, teams, and business units. 
• Partner with NetApp's sales organization to qualify jointly sourced leads, coordinate account engagement, and maintain clear opportunity ownership and communication. 
• Maintain accurate pipeline and account plans, disciplined follow-through, reliable forecasts, and accountability for individual sales quota. 
• Build trust through transparent communication, realistic commitments, and responsible representation of product capabilities and evaluation results. 
• Share customer needs, competitive insights, and field feedback with product, engineering, Product Marketing, and leadership; help develop repeatable sales plays and customer references. 

Qualifications & Education

• 8+ years in a sales capacity; Bachelors preferred
• Proven success in a quota-carrying enterprise sales role, personally prospecting, developing, and closing net-new complex technology deals. 
• Strong hunter mentality and demonstrated ability to generate demand and pipeline without depending on an installed base or mature inbound lead engine. 
• Experience selling enterprise data, analytics, cloud infrastructure, AI, or other technically sophisticated products; experience with the Spark ecosystem or platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake is highly desirable. 
• Understanding of enterprise workloads including ETL/ELT, data preparation, data transformation, large-scale analytics, and AI-related data pipelines. 
• Familiarity with data lakes, lakehouses, cloud storage, and major cloud infrastructure platforms such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. 
• Experience driving customer PoCs with defined success criteria and representative workloads, in partnership with technical teams, and converting results into commercial agreements. 
• Strong consultative selling, executive communication, account planning, value-selling, and cross-functional collaboration skills. 
• High integrity, customer trust, transparency, persistence, personal accountability, and consistent follow-through. 
• Comfort with ambiguity and building a zero-to-one sales motion; experience in startup and large-enterprise environments is preferred.