Principal GTM Lead (SAN JOSE)

Own Every Moment at NetApp

At NetApp, your ideas power innovation. We lead in intelligent data infrastructure-delivering unified storage, integrated data services, and solutions that help organizations unlock the full potential of their data, from AI to multicloud.

Ready to innovate and contribute to our path to $10B? Here, you'll collaborate with passionate teams, tackle real-world challenges, and see your impact in how customers transform and grow. If you're ready to bring curiosity, creativity, and drive to every moment, NetApp is where your journey begins. Join teams that innovate to elevate, drive results, and excel together across every function.

Job Summary

The Principal GTM Lead, Portfolio Strategy is a high-impact, senior individual contributor role bridging Business Unit (BU) Product Management, Product Marketing, Competitive Intelligence, our global technical field organization (Sales Engineers, Principal GTM Architects, and Partner Technical Leaders), and Client Executive Sales organization.

Serving as the Chief Field Advocate and GTM Strategist within the Portfolio Strategy team, you ensure every product launch, NDA roadmap disclosure, and solution narrative is technically sound, field-ready, aggressively differentiated, and directly actionable for sellers. Leveraging deep architectural mastery of enterprise storage markets and field sales dynamics, you translate raw technical capabilities into targeted How-to-Sell plays-tailoring the message to expand our installed base, win net-new customer logos, and establish dominance in emerging workloads and markets.

Capabilities

• Field Credibility: Established reputation and gravitas within senior technical sales and architect communities.
• Strategic Street Smarts: Ability to balance high-level strategic portfolio vision with the tactical realities of competitive field sales cycles.
• Collaborative Review Style: High emotional intelligence, constructive review approach, and dedication to mentoring and elevating team output.

Responsibilities

How-to-Sell Strategy & Targeted Sales Plays

• Installed-Base Modernization: Author sales plays and technical talk tracks for existing accounts. Highlight refresh justifications, next-gen upgrades, protocol expansion (block/object/unified), and consumption models (Cloud, Keystone).
• Net-New Customer Acquisition: Craft targeted displacement plays and friction-free land strategies to unseat incumbents in competitive accounts.
• New Workloads & Market Expansion: Prescribe positioning for emerging domains, including Enterprise GenAI pipelines, modern virtualization, cyber vaulting, and hybrid multicloud data management.
• Sales Motion Alignment: Establish qualification criteria, discovery questions, objection handling, and architectural sizing guidance to accelerate deal velocity.

Competitive Differentiation & Market Positioning

• Embed Competitive Edge: Systematically integrate Why We Win differentiation and counter-positioning into launches, roadmaps, technical FAQs, and solution decks.
• Competitor Acumen: Maintain architectural expertise across primary, secondary/backup, file/object, and cloud storage rivals (e.g., Pure Storage, Dell, HPE, VAST Data, hyperscalers).
• Deconstruct Rival Claims: Partner with Competitive Intelligence to expose competitor vulnerabilities and arm technical teams with credible counter-arguments.
• Win/Loss Integration: Synthesize competitive trends to refine sales plays and feed feature gap analysis back to product teams.

NDA Roadmap Strategy & Global Technical Training

• Lead Enablement Sessions: Partner with BU Product Managers to curate and deliver monthly NDA roadmap enablement for global SEs, GTM Architects, and key partner technical leaders.
• Design Presentation Frameworks: Build standardized, high-impact roadmap templates and visual narratives for executive customer briefings and semi-annual release cycles.
• Bridge Inbound & Outbound Roadmaps: Act as the technical and editorial sanity check to ensure roadmap commitments solve field friction and capitalize on market opportunities.

Technical Launch Review & Quality Assurance

• Commercial & Technical Tollgate: Rigorously review launch assets (whitepapers, battlecards, decks) to ensure deep technical accuracy, relevance, and role alignment.
• Peer Review & Mentorship: Provide technical critique, competitive polish, and structural feedback across Portfolio Strategy deliverables prior to distribution.
• Workload-to-Outcome Translation: Convert complex block, file, object, cyber resilience, and hybrid cloud architectures into clear business outcomes.

Cross-Functional Influence & Field Advocacy

• Stakeholder Bridge: Build trusted alignment across BU General Managers, Product Management, PMM, and Regional SE Leadership (Americas, EMEA, APAC).
• Influence Product Evolution: Channel field and customer feedback into BU development gates, RFE prioritization, and long-term portfolio direction.
• Support Strategic GTM: Drive execution across key portfolio pillars: Cloud, Keystone (STaaS), Enterprise AI, Virtualization Optimization, and Sustainability.

Requirements & Education

• Typically requires a minimum of 15+ years of progressive experience in senior technical go-to-market roles, such as Senior/Principal Sales Engineer, Field CTO / Principal GTM Architect, Technical Marketing Engineer (TME), or Technical Product Manager .
• Proven How-to-Sell Playbook Development: Demonstrated track record of creating field-adopted sales plays, customer journey maps, and technical messaging for both installed-base expansion and net-new customer acquisition.
• Deep Storage & Infrastructure Mastery: Hands-on architectural knowledge of enterprise storage architectures (unified file, block, object), flash storage economics, cyber-vaulting/ransomware recovery, and hybrid cloud integration. Deep familiarity with the NetApp portfolio (ONTAP, Cloud, ASA/AFF/FAS, StorageGRID, Keystone, NetApp Console) is strongly preferred.
• Proven Competitive Acumen: Demonstrated mastery of the enterprise data storage competitive landscape (both traditional on-premises and hyperscaler cloud storage offerings), with a proven track record of creating battle-tested competitive collateral and sales enablement.
• Audience Resonance & Storytelling: Proven ability to command the room with senior technical leaders (CTOs, Enterprise Architects) and distill complex engineering concepts into crisp, differentiated value propositions.
• Presentation & Template Craftsmanship: Outstanding skill in building executive-ready, visually compelling presentations and architectural frameworks.
• Cross-Functional Influence: Demonstrated ability to influence senior cross-functional leaders (VPs, GMs, Directors) without direct authority.

The target salary range for this position is 227,800 - 338,800USD. The salary offered will be determined by the candidate's location, qualifications, experience, and education and may be outside of this range. Final compensation packages are competitive and in line with industry standards, reflecting a variety of factors, and include a comprehensive benefits package. This may cover Health Insurance, Life Insurance, Retirement or Pension Plans, Paid Time Off (PTO), various Leave options, Performance-Based Incentives, employee stock purchase plan, and/or restricted stocks (RSU's), with all offerings subject to regional variations and governed by local laws, regulations, and company policies. Benefits may vary by country and region, and further details will be provided as part of the recruitment process.

At NetApp, we embrace a hybrid working environment designed to strengthen connection, collaboration, and culture for all employees. This means that most roles will have some level of in-office and/or in-person expectations, which will be shared during the recruitment process.

Equal Opportunity Employer:

NetApp is firmly committed to Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and to compliance with all federal, state and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination based on age, race, color, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, disability or genetic information, pregnancy, protected veteran status, and any other protected classification.

Why You'll Thrive at NetApp

At NetApp, you won't wait for the perfect moment-you'll make it. The early planning, the extra thought, the bold idea that turns good into great: That's how our people operate and how we continue to push the boundaries of data infrastructure.

NetApp is the trusted partner for organizations transforming data into opportunity. As the only enterprise-grade storage service natively embedded in Google Cloud, AWS, and Microsoft Azure, we empower customers to run everything from traditional workloads to enterprise AI with unmatched performance, resilience, and security.

Our culture

We celebrate mold breakers, bold thinkers, and problem solvers. We reward initiative, impact, and ownership. We provide flexibility so you can balance professional ambition with your personal life. Here, differences are not just welcomed-they drive everything we do.

If you're ready to innovate, rise to the challenge, and own every moment - make your next move your best one. Apply now.

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