Job SummaryAerospike is hiring a Principal Value Engineer to help enterprise customers build a clear, defensible case for investing in Aerospike. This person will translate technical change into measurable business impact using the customer's priorities, operating data, and financial assumptions.
Operating as a strategic overlay on selected opportunities, you will partner closely with Account Executives, Solutions Engineers, Customer Success, and customer executives. While the Solutions Engineer owns technical discovery, architecture, and technical proof, you will own the value hypothesis, economic discovery, cost of inaction, financial model, executive business case, and value-realization handoff.
This is a customer-facing role for someone who moves comfortably between technical architecture discussions and executive investment reviews. The strongest candidate brings the technical credibility of an experienced Solutions Engineer alongside the financial discipline to build ROI, TCO, NPV, payback, and risk models that customers can validate and defend internally.
Job Responsibilities- Prioritize & Strategize: Partner with Sales leadership to prioritize Value Engineering engagement based on opportunity size, complexity, and executive access. Research customer business priorities and industry pressures upfront to build testable value hypotheses.
- Lead Value Discovery: Facilitate business outcome workshops with technical leaders, business owners, Finance, and procurement. Establish current-state baselines, target future states, and the cost of inaction-clearly separating customer facts from external benchmarks and assumptions.
- Align Technical Proof to Business Value: Partner with Solutions Engineers to define proof-of-value success criteria and baseline metrics before evaluations begin. Translate technical improvements (latency, throughput, infrastructure footprint, resilience, developer effort) into measurable business outcomes.
- Build & Defend Business Cases: Develop customer-specific financial models (ROI, TCO, NPV, payback, risk exposure) and concise executive summaries. Present and defend the economic case with senior stakeholders, revising models as new customer evidence emerges.
- Support Deal Strategy: Advise on proposal, pricing, and negotiation strategy by linking investment to expected value, timing, and risk-relying strictly on validated customer evidence.
- Ensure Post-Sale Continuity: Create a Value Realization Plan at close documenting approved baselines, target outcomes, and measurement dates. Hand off the plan to Customer Success and participate in select executive value reviews.
- Scale the Discipline & Enable the Field: Build reusable financial models, discovery guides, and benchmark libraries without turning engagements into generic calculator exercises. Coach AEs, SEs, and CS teams on economic discovery, and feed recurring customer evidence back to Product, Marketing, and GTM leadership.
Qualifications- 10+ years of experience in enterprise technology across Solutions Engineering, value consulting, management consulting, business transformation, or strategic pre-sales.
- Proven track record building, presenting, and defending customer-specific business cases for complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise software investments.
- Experience with real-time data, NoSQL databases, cloud economics, AI infrastructure, or mission-critical workloads (e.g., fraud prevention, payments, real-time decisioning, customer 360, personalization, or adtech).
- Strong financial modeling skills (ROI, TCO, NPV, payback period, cost of inaction, sensitivity analysis) with rigorous, transparent treatment of assumptions.
- Technical fluency in enterprise data platforms, distributed systems, or cloud infrastructure, with the ability to grasp architectural tradeoffs without replacing the Solutions Engineer.
- Exceptional workshop facilitation, executive presence, and data-storytelling skills-able to distill complex analyses into crisp executive narratives.
- Comfort building a new function in a growing company, including defining engagement rules, reusable assets, and impact metrics.
- Willingness to travel up to 30% for customer workshops, executive meetings, and company events.
Preferred Qualifications- Experience partnering with Customer Success to track post-sale realized value for executive reviews, renewals, and expansions.
- MBA, graduate degree, or equivalent practical experience in business, finance, economics, or engineering.
- Advanced spreadsheet modeling skills and familiarity with Salesforce or comparable CRMs.
What Success Looks Like- Targeted Impact: Value Engineering is deployed selectively where it materially improves decision quality and deal outcomes, rather than acting as a checkbox in every sales cycle.
- Defensible Rigor: Business cases rely on customer-validated baselines, withstand Finance and executive scrutiny, and clearly quantify the cost of delay.
- Outcome-Driven Evaluations: Technical proofs measure the exact metrics required for the buyer's decision, and final readouts translate technical wins into business terms.
- Seamless Handoffs: Closed-won deals transition to Customer Success with a documented Value Realization Plan, clear measurement milestones, and named customer owners.
