Strategic Account Manager – AI Infrastructure Sales

Job description

Strategic Account Manager – AI Infrastructure Americas Sales – AI Infrastructure Geography: San Jose, California | Travel: 25%Compensation: • Base salary: $129,600 - $172,800 USD plus sales incentive performance paid quarterly. • On-Target Earnings (OTE): $199,390 - $265,853 USD annually, at 100% Attainment Role Overview This role is central to Western Digital’s AI Infrastructure growth strategy, focused on driving datacenter storage adoption across a defined set of strategic platform and infrastructure customers. The Strategic Account Manager is a quota-carrying seller responsible for owning account strategy, expanding multi-year platform opportunities, and converting architectural alignment into repeatable revenue. This role requires the ability to operate at the intersection of infrastructure platforms, software-defined storage, and data lifecycle architectures while navigating complex buying centers. Target Account Focus This role will focus on strategic software-defined storage, data protection, hybrid cloud, HCI, scale-out platform providers, and infrastructure software companies. The role is expected to understand each customer’s architecture, roadmap, appliance or platform strategy, and long-term capacity growth model, then align WD technologies to their product, qualification, and go-to-market priorities. Customer Segments 1. Data Platform & Cloud Software Providers Companies building distributed data platforms, hybrid cloud stacks, HCI architectures, scale-out file systems, and enterprise storage frameworks. • Align to software-defined storage, hybrid cloud, HCI, scale-out file, and distributed systems architectures • Influence long-term product, platform, and validated solution roadmaps • Drive integration of storage into large-scale multi-tenant, appliance, and software-defined environments 2. Enterprise Infrastructure & Systems Providers Organizations delivering integrated infrastructure solutions across compute, networking, and storage. • Position storage within full-stack infrastructure solutions • Navigate product, procurement, and go-to-market organizations • Drive design-ins and platform standardization 3. Data Protection & Specialized Storage Platforms Vendors focused on cyber resilience, backup, recovery, archiving, immutable data protection, and high-performance storage use cases. • Understand data lifecycle requirements from performance to backup, recovery, archive, and long-term retention • Align storage economics with deduplication, compression, tiering, scalability, and performance needs • Drive capacity growth tied to appliance, reference architecture, cyber resilience, and software-defined platform strategies What You Will Own Strategic Account Growth & Pipeline Ownership • Develop and execute multi-year account plans aligned to platform refresh cycles, customer buying centers, and long-term revenue growth • Maintain a high-confidence pipeline, drive forecast accuracy, and manage execution cadence across strategic opportunities Architecture-Led Selling & Platform Influence • Position WD storage within software-defined and AI data architectures by translating workload requirements into infrastructure, scalability, and cost value • Engage customer engineering and product teams to drive design-in, validation, platform standardization, and future roadmap influence Executive Engagement & Complex Deal Leadership • Build senior stakeholder relationships and communicate WD’s value tied to scalability, cost, and long-term platform advantage • Own large, multi-stakeholder opportunities and lead negotiation through close across global organizations Platform Ecosystem & Account-Specific Growth • Develop account strategies tailored to software-defined storage, data protection, HCI, hybrid cloud, and scale-out file platform providers • Identify where WD technologies improve platform economics, density, performance-per-watt, retention cost, and long-term capacity scaling • Build relationships across product management, hardware engineering, qualification, supply chain, procurement, alliances, and executive stakeholders • Drive WD technology qualification into customer appliances, reference architectures, validated solutions, and future platform releases • Convert roadmap alignment into design wins, repeatable platform revenue, and long-term supply commitments New Technology Introduction & Adoption • Introduce and position new WD datacenter technologies, including UltraSMR, high-capacity HDD platforms, advanced firmware capabilities, and emerging storage innovations • Identify customer workloads and architectures where new technologies deliver measurable cost, density, power, and scalability advantages • Drive early technical engagement with customer architecture, engineering, qualification, and product teams • Coordinate internal alignment across sales, product, engineering, marketing, and supply chain to support customer adoption • Build customer-specific adoption plans from technical education to proof of concept, qualification, platform integration, and volume deployment • Translate customer feedback into roadmap input for future WD products and platform requirements Experience • 8–12+ years in datacenter, cloud, or infrastructure sales • Experience selling into platform providers and infrastructure vendors • Experience selling to or partnering with data protection, HCI, hybrid cloud, scale-out file, or software-defined storage platform companies • Proven success managing complex sales cycles • Background selling solution-based offerings • Experience introducing new infrastructure technologies into strategic accounts, including technical positioning, customer qualification, and adoption planning Core Skills • Architecture-led solution selling • Strategic account planning • Understanding of backup, recovery, cyber resilience, HCI, scale-out file, hybrid cloud, and software-defined storage architectures • Executive engagement and communication • Cross-functional influence •