Introduction

A career in IBM Software means you'll be part of a team that transforms our customer's challenges into industry-leading solutions. We are an infinitely curious team, always seeking new possibilities, and dedicated to creating the world's leading AI-powered, cloud-native software solutions. Our renowned legacy creates endless global opportunities for our network of IBMers. We are a team of deep product experts, ensuring exceptional client experiences, with a focus on delivery, excellence, and obsession over customer outcomes. This position involves contributing to HashiCorp's offerings, now part of IBM, which empower organizations to automate and secure multi-cloud and hybrid environments. You will join a team managing the lifecycle of infrastructure and security, enhancing IBM's cloud solutions to ensure enterprises achieve efficiency, security, and scalability in their cloud journey.

Your role and responsibilities

The Field CTO role is a high-impact position passionate about executive-level engagement, field enablement, and strategic product feedback. As a Field CTO, you act as an extension of the CTO and CEO to strategically enable and support sales teams by building pipelines, closing opportunities, and maintaining long-term relationships with customer leadership teams. You are a trusted advisor to our customers, providing business, technical, and organizational guidance and thought leadership to drive customer outcomes. You work closely with regional sales leadership to focus on top-priority accounts within the theater with significant pipeline impact. As the technical leader and executive sponsor for key accounts, you deeply understand the customer's technical landscape and can articulate how HashiCorp's products drive their business success. You also broadly influence the strategic direction for customer messaging through collaboration with the Strategy team, R&D, the broader field, and industry events. You are a trusted advisor to our customers, providing business, technical, and thought leadership to drive adoption and success with our products.
Illustrating the impact of the HashiCorp product suite in delivering customer outcomes is your strength, and you showcase your thought leadership and technical expertise through participation in webinars, speaking events, round tables, white papers, marketing events, advisory boards, and executive briefings. Dynamic communication and presentation skills amongst varied audiences of both business and technology leaders are essential for success in this role, and you should be as adept at engaging with the customer’s C-level executives as you are working closely with internal product and engineering teams.
As Field CTO, you contribute to public and internal messaging of the HashiCorp principles and tech vision to existing and potential customer executives and decision-makers and enable internal teams and partners to elevate the product narrative. A HashiCorp FCTO is regarded as a business and technical thought leader and a well-rounded technologist in the IT/application operations landscape.
What you’ll do

• Work closely with field marketing teams to spread awareness and support pipeline building via customer touch points (round tables, workshops, etc), conferences, strategic events, blogs, webinars, and whitepapers, among other opportunities.
• Aggregate and synthesize customer feedback on product messaging, pricing, and capabilities and communicate those findings to the relevant internal organizations (sales, marketing, R&D, enablement, services).
• Coordinate with the regional sales team to establish relevant relationships and act as a technical lead and trusted advisor to accelerate the pipeline for strategic accounts.
• Understand the customer's technical, people, and process needs, and articulate how HashiCorp's products can meet those needs for the enterprise.
• Work closely with the field teams to identify opportunities for product adoption, expansion, and extension within their accounts, to communicate a unified vision, and to collaborate through thought leadership.
• Collaborate with product and marketing teams to provide feedback on customer needs and struggles to ensure our products' proper future direction and success.
• Drive customer CISO/CxO engagements with the field teams.
• Validate and contribute to technical materials, standard methodologies, etc., based on field experience to continuously up-level and enable our internal partners.
• Lead executive briefings and advisory boards with customers, partners, and prospects.
• Educate, mentor, and promote up-skilling within the sales and customer success teams on HashiCorp's products through internal enablement efforts.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Bachelor's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• You must have an Engineering/CS/MIS Bachelor’s Degree, a military leadership position, or 10+ years of relevant proven experience
• Have a history of executive engagement or served at an executive level
• Enjoy speaking in front of crowds, from small to very large, virtually
• Are a well-rounded SME with technical depth in cloud automation, DevOps, and security
• Have recent industry experience and deep technical background in DevOps & infrastructure automation tooling
• Have a high-level understanding of the design principles for distributed computing architectures
• Have the ability to interact with and influence business decision-makers (CxO) and technical decision-makers within the Global 2000
• Have experience leading or selling to large enterprise environments
• Can understand and communicate the value proposition of strategic and tactical solutions for complex enterprise use cases
• Can participate in dynamic conversations around sales mechanics that will enable you to influence key stakeholders positively
• Have the ability to act as an industry inspiring leader in both customer meetings and public settings
• Excel at staying close to industry trends to gain a deeper product understanding
• Have strong verbal, written, visual communication, and presentation skills, particularly in ad-hoc situations (comfortable on a whiteboard)
• Your are willing and have the ability to travel up to 50%

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Advanced Technical Solution Development: Deep expertise in designing and refining technical solutions, with a focus on leveraging current product capabilities and providing strategic input to product teams. Experience in constructing complex use cases to drive sales and growth. Ability to analyze market trends and competitor activity to inform solution development. • Expertise in Emerging Technologies: Experience with emerging technologies and trends, with the ability to apply this knowledge to drive innovation and growth in technical solution design and delivery. • Technical Thought Leadership: Established reputation as a technical thought leader, with a track record of driving technical innovation and excellence in solution design and delivery. Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.