Strategic Account Manager – AI Infrastructure Sales

Skills this role screens for

About the role

Strategic Account Manager – AI Infrastructure

Americas Sales – AI Infrastructure

Geography: San Jose, California  |  Travel: 25%

What you get

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

Also

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.

Also

Customer Segments

Companies building distributed data platforms, hybrid cloud stacks, HCI architectures, scale-out file systems, and enterprise storage frameworks.

Organizations delivering integrated infrastructure solutions across compute, networking, and storage.

Vendors focused on cyber resilience, backup, recovery, archiving, immutable data protection, and high-performance storage use cases.

What You Will Own

Strategic Account Growth & Pipeline Ownership

Architecture-Led Selling & Platform Influence

Executive Engagement & Complex Deal Leadership

Platform Ecosystem & Account-Specific Growth

• Data Platform & Cloud Software Providers
• 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
• Enterprise Infrastructure & Systems Providers
• Position storage within full-stack infrastructure solutions
• Navigate product, procurement, and go-to-market organizations
• Drive design-ins and platform standardization
• Data Protection & Specialized Storage Platforms
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

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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

Who they want

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

Who they want

Core Skills

WD is committed to providing equal opportunities to all applicants and employees and will not discriminate against any applicant or employee based on their race, color, ancestry, religion (including religious dress and grooming standards), sex (including pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, breastfeeding or related medical conditions), gender (including a person’s gender identity, gender expression, and gender-related appearance and behavior, whether or not stereotypically associated with the person’s assigned sex at birth), age, national origin, sexual orientation, medical condition, marital status (including domestic partnership status), physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, protected medical and family care leave, Civil Air Patrol status, military and veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. We also prohibit harassment of any individual on any of the characteristics listed above. Our non-discrimination policy applies to all aspects of employment. We comply with the laws and regulations set forth in the "Know Your Rights: Workplace Discrimination is Illegal” poster. Our pay transparency policy is available here.

WD thrives on the power and potential of diversity. As a global company, we believe the most effective way to embrace the diversity of our customers and communities is to mirror it from within. We believe the fusion of various perspectives results in the best outcomes for our employees, our company, our customers, and the world around us. We are committed to an inclusive environment where every individual can thrive through a sense of belonging, respect and contribution.…

• 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
• Complex deal execution
• Business and financial acumen
• New technology introduction and customer adoption planning
• Pipeline and forecast discipline