Field Architect

Role Overview

Field Architect at MinIO. This is a senior customer-facing technical position focused on defining, validating, and guiding architectures for AI, analytics, cloud-native applications, and large-scale data platforms. Location not specified in source material.

Company Overview

MinIO is the data and memory foundation for enterprise AI. Built for the speed, scale, and economics that AI and analytics demand, AIStor and MemKV unify every layer of the data stack, from agentic and inference context memory to tables and objects across core, edge, and cloud. Trusted by 77% of the Fortune 100, MinIO is redefining how AI factories, intelligent applications, and autonomous agents secure, persist, and unlock the full value of their data.

Role Purpose

Serve as a trusted technical advisor to customers, partners, and internal teams, translating business and application requirements into robust technical designs that deliver measurable outcomes. Collaborate closely with the broader MinIO team through technical discovery, architecture design, proof-of-concept (PoC) delivery, production onboarding, performance validation, and long-term expansion.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Lead technical discovery with customers and partners to understand business goals, data sources, application requirements, infrastructure constraints, and success criteria.
• Design end-to-end architectures that address customer requirements across the full data stack.
• Design solutions spanning ingestion and change data capture (CDC), batch and streaming pipelines, data processing, lakehouse storage and table formats, catalogs, query and analytics engines, orchestration, data quality, governance, and AI integration.
• Guide customers through architecture decisions and tradeoffs, demonstrating how data stack components work together.
• Define and validate architectures for AI/ML training and inference, analytics, lakehouse environments, high-performance data pipelines, and modern application data services.
• Serve as subject matter expert in AIStor, object storage, S3-compatible architectures, distributed systems, replication, erasure coding, security, performance tuning, and large-scale namespace design.

Customer Engagement & PoC Delivery

• Build trusted relationships with customer technical stakeholders across data engineering, analytics, AI, infrastructure, platform, security, application, and operations teams.
• Guide customers toward informed architecture decisions based on technical expertise and business context.
• Plan and conduct customer PoCs from initial scope through final technical review.
• Establish success criteria, design and deploy PoC solutions, and integrate required data stack components.
• Build representative use cases and run functional and performance tests.
• Troubleshoot issues, document results, and drive PoCs to clear outcomes and production plans.
• Partner with Customer Engineering, Product Management, and Engineering to help customers transition from PoC to production.
• Expand adoption across additional workloads and teams within customer organizations.

Ecosystem, Enablement & Field Operations

• Provide technical leadership on Kubernetes, containers, automation, and deployment patterns across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
• Work with customer teams and technology partners to integrate data sources, ingestion and streaming tools, processing and analytics engines, AI platforms, identity systems, observability tools, and infrastructure components.
• Deliver architecture presentations, whiteboard sessions, demonstrations, workshops, and technical enablement for customers, partners, and internal teams.
• Lead or contribute to technical responses for RFPs and RFIs covering the full data platform, including architecture, integrations, security, scalability, performance, and operational requirements.

Product Intelligence & Market Expertise

• Capture customer requirements, PoC findings, integration needs, and field feedback for internal teams.
• Work with Product and Engineering teams to resolve gaps and inform priorities.
• Stay current on object storage, data lakehouse, AI infrastructure, analytics, Kubernetes, cloud, and competing data platforms.
• Explain technical differentiation in the context of customer use cases.

Qualifications & Experience

• 10+ years of experience in a senior customer-facing technical role such as Field Architect, Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, Systems Engineer, or Technical Consultant.
• Hands-on experience designing, integrating, and troubleshooting end-to-end data platforms, including several of the following: ingestion, CDC, batch and streaming processing, lakehouse architecture, catalogs, query engines, orchestration, data quality, governance, and AI/analytics workloads.
• Demonstrated experience leading customer PoCs, including defining success criteria, deploying and integrating components, validating functionality and performance, resolving technical issues, and presenting results.
• Strong understanding of object storage and S3-compatible architectures, including security, replication, data protection, performance, and scale-out design.
• Hands-on experience with Linux, networking, storage systems, containers, Kubernetes, and modern data center infrastructure.
• Practical experience with relevant data stack technologies such as Kafka, Debezium, NiFi, Spark, Flink, Trino, Starburst, Iceberg, Delta Lake, or data catalogs. Experience with every listed technology is not required.
• Experience designing or supporting AI, machine learning, analytics, lakehouse, or large-scale data pipeline environments.
• Experience with public and hybrid cloud environments, including AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, or private cloud platforms.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related technical field. Equivalent practical experience will also be considered.

Skills & Competencies

• Ability to lead technical discovery, design architectures, build demonstrations, analyze performance, and troubleshoot integrations.
• Ability to communicate tradeoffs clearly with both technical and executive audiences.
• Strong verbal, written, whiteboarding, and presentation skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively across customers, partners, Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Engineering teams.
• Strong customer-success orientation, intellectual curiosity, sense of ownership, and ability to prioritize effectively in a fast-moving environment.

Additional Information

• Willingness to travel as needed to support customers, partners, field events, and internal team activities.
• MinIO is an equal opportunity workplace and affirmative action employer. We review applications for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, veteran status, genetic information, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, or any other basis prohibited by law.