Job Summary
The Role:
The Solutions Consultant Defense is the evolution of the traditional Sales Engineering role. This role aligns with how we best serve our customers in understanding their environment, providing solution guidance, and ensuring value realization in their investment with Palo Alto Networks.
As a Solutions Consultant Defense, you drive technical leadership and guide customers through their security transformation journeys. You play a key role in defining technical solutions that secure a customer’s key business imperatives. Crucially, you take end-to-end technical ownership of your accounts, ensuring solution fit, deployment quality, adoption, and ongoing technical health throughout the customer lifecycle. You evangelize our industry leadership in on-prem, cloud, and security operations services, establishing Palo Alto Networks as your customer’s cybersecurity partner of choice.
Your Impact
Curiosity is core to the Solutions Consultant role, and you see complex problems as opportunities to learn and deliver innovative solutions! Your impact is defined by taking continuous ownership across the customer journey and execution of the following:
Meeting and exceeding sales quotas by building and implementing strategic, technical account plans that target cross-platform solutions.
Conducting foundational discovery using structured thinking and technical expertise to understand and articulate the technical priorities of your prospects and customers.
Identifying technical stakeholders and cultivating relationships with key personas to build and drive a security architecture transformation roadmap.
Using an understanding of key customer business requirements to position, demonstrate, and create high-level designs across the entire Palo Alto Networks portfolio, creating business value for customers.
Leading successful technical validation efforts based on best practices to ensure a technical win in assigned opportunities.
Promoting specific, focused solutions that include Palo Alto Networks technologies and aligning with professional services to support initial customer outcomes and ensure successful product adoption.
Supporting project-specific technical ownership and serving as a supportive technical advisor for assigned accounts, ensuring solution validation, deployment readiness, and initial product adoption while maintaining feature alignment and immediate technical health of individual projects, resulting in strong customer relationships.
Monitoring customer usage and outcomes to help identify optimization opportunities and potential risks, partnering with account teams and other technical experts to re-engage customers and support continued value from Palo Alto Networks solutions.
Navigating the internal cross-functional landscape, collaborating with Professional Services, Customer Success, Specialists, Channel partners, and Support teams to help align strategies, remove obstacles, and contribute to a one-team approach that supports a seamless, outcome-driven journey across the customer lifecycle.
Demonstrating professional presence and strong communication skills to guide customer decision-making through impactful technical engagements, standard product briefings, feature-focused demonstrations, and workshops that translate complex security concepts into clear technical capability.
Maintaining foundational knowledge of direct competitors while presenting the value of the Palo Alto Networks platform, clearly differentiating its features, and supporting customer strategy through standard positioning and technical advocacy.
Learning continuously to develop technical and professional skills that support customer success, while engaging with the Solutions Consultant community and participating in internal knowledge-sharing opportunities.
Qualifications
Your Experience:
Technical pre-sales experience required; previous experience selling, implementing, or managing SaaS offerings is strongly preferred
Experience in Defense Market is required
Demonstrated ability to meet or exceed performance goals
Experience in influencing and gaining buy-in from key stakeholders, either in a customer-facing or internal role
Experience collaboratively creating and delivering standardized technical presentations, workshops, or technical validation engagements under structured guidance for standard customer accounts.
Experience in complex sales with long sales cycles, multiple buying centers, and multi-product solutions is preferred.
Skilled in or foundational knowledge in at least one of the following: Networking, Network Security, Cybersecurity, Private/Public Cloud Security, SOC/Endpoint, SASE, or AI Security.
Experience assisting a customer support-like function to ensure the successful implementation and adoption of sold solutions is strongly preferred
Driven by technical curiosity to self-develop skills in emerging domains, utilizing high AI fluency to elevate work quality and accelerate outcomes.
Our Commitment
We’re trailblazers that dream big, take risks, and challenge cybersecurity’s status quo. It’s simple: we can’t accomplish our mission without diverse teams innovating, together.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for all qualified individuals with a disability. If you require assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need, please contact us at accommodations@paloaltonetworks.com.
Palo Alto Networks is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity in our workplace, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or other legally protected characteristics.
All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
Is role eligible for Immigration Sponsorship? No. Please note that we will not sponsor applicants for work visas for this position.
