VP of Systems Engineering - Federal

VAST Data is building the data platform for the AI era. The VAST Data Platform brings together storage, database, compute, and data services into a unified architecture designed to power the world’s most demanding AI, analytics, and data-intensive environments.

We’re looking for a Vice President of Systems Engineering – Federal to lead the technical field organization supporting VAST’s U.S. Federal business.

The Role

The VP of Systems Engineering – Federal is a second-line leadership role responsible for building, leading, and scaling the Systems Engineering organization supporting VAST’s Federal business.

This leader will manage SE leaders and their teams across the Federal organization, establish the technical strategy for the business, and partner closely with Federal Sales leadership to drive growth across defense, intelligence, and civilian agencies.

This is not simply a people-management position.

We’re looking for a technical and commercial leader who can operate comfortably from the executive level down to the architecture—someone capable of advising senior government technology leaders, shaping complex AI and data infrastructure strategies, developing exceptional SE leaders, and stepping into the most technically demanding opportunities when needed.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the Federal Systems Engineering organization, managing and developing first-line SE leaders and their teams across the U.S. Federal business.
• Build the organizational structure, leadership bench, technical capabilities, and operating model required to scale VAST’s Federal business.
• Partner with Federal Sales leadership to define account strategy, prioritize opportunities, penetrate strategic agencies, and win significant new programs.
• Establish a consistently high bar for technical discovery, solution architecture, competitive positioning, POCs, executive engagement, and technical deal execution.
• Develop SE managers into exceptional leaders who can recruit, coach, challenge, and elevate their teams—not simply administer them.
• Remain actively engaged in VAST’s largest and most strategic Federal opportunities, particularly where executive alignment, complex architecture, or competitive differentiation is critical.
• Build trusted relationships with senior government technology leaders, architects, program leaders, mission partners, and the broader Federal technology ecosystem.
• Translate complex mission and business requirements into full-stack architectures spanning compute, networking, storage, data platforms, cloud, and AI infrastructure.
• Ensure the SE organization can articulate not only how VAST works, but why its architecture matters to a customer's mission and technology strategy.
• Partner closely with Product, Engineering, CTO Office, Support, Alliances, and Sales to bring Federal requirements into VAST and VAST innovation into the Federal market.
• Develop repeatable technical sales motions that increase the organization's ability to win and scale.
• Create a culture of accountability, intellectual curiosity, technical excellence, customer obsession, and continuous development across the Federal SE organization.

• Significant leadership experience within Systems Engineering, Solutions Engineering, technical pre-sales, or field architecture organizations supporting the U.S. Federal market.
• Proven experience as a second-line leader, with responsibility for developing managers as well as building and scaling larger technical organizations.
• Demonstrated success supporting complex Federal technology sales across DoD, Intelligence Community, and/or Federal Civilian agencies.
• A track record of helping technical organizations create and win net-new business, rather than primarily supporting an established customer base.
• Experience building organizations in high-growth or rapidly changing environments, including recruiting exceptional talent, establishing operating rhythms, and raising the performance bar.
• Deep full-stack technical credibility across modern data and AI infrastructure: strong understanding of distributed storage and data architectures; file and object protocols including NFS, SMB, and S3; NVMe/NVMe-oF; high-performance networking including Ethernet, RDMA/RoCE, and InfiniBand; Linux; Kubernetes and containers; cloud platforms; and modern GPU infrastructure including NVIDIA and AMD. - Strong understanding of the modern data and AI ecosystem, including technologies such as Spark, Iceberg, Delta Lake, Trino, Kafka, GPU infrastructure, AI training and inference architectures, and the infrastructure required to operate these environments at scale. - Ability to reason across the entire technology stack—compute, networking, storage, data platforms, and AI infrastructure—and challenge senior SEs and architects on solution design, performance, scalability, and tradeoffs.
• Strong executive presence with the ability to move seamlessly between deeply technical architecture conversations and strategic discussions with senior government and technology executives.
• Demonstrated ability to translate architectural differentiation into mission impact, business value, competitive advantage, and measurable customer outcomes.
• Strong understanding of the Federal partner ecosystem and how OEMs, integrators, channel partners, technology alliances, and other strategic partners influence Federal opportunities.
• Ability to travel as required to support customers, partners, and the Federal organization.