Chris Lies

About Chris Lies

Throughout my career I have functioned as the de facto SE Manager — leading teams of Systems Engineers, running 1:1s, delegating and reviewing technical deliverables, advocating for engineers with leadership, and serving as the primary escalation point on complex enterprise pursuits — while carrying a full pre-sales quota. I grew a single account from $15M to $200M. I led a five-person engineering team on a Bank of America engagement. The title hasn\'t always matched the work. The work has always been there. My foundation is enterprise storage: all-flash architectures, SAN/NAS/DAS, FC, iSCSI, distributed systems, and competitive positioning across Dell, NetApp, Pure Storage, and HPE. I layer on deep expertise in cloud-native platforms, VMware, hybrid infrastructure, and modern web architectures — giving me the range to lead SEs selling into any corner of the enterprise stack. I\'ve been the customer and the vendor. That perspective makes me a better coach — I know how buyers think, what moves deals, and how to build an SE team that creates and closes technical demand rather than just responding to it. Engineer. Architect. Leader. Coach. I develop technical talent, elevate customer outcomes, and move fast enough to stay ahead of the market.

Experience

1. Sr Solutions Architect

   Level Solutions Group, Llc

   May 2025 — Present

Education

• University of Pittsburgh

  Bachelor of Science, Information Science

Skills

• Netapp
• Nfs
• Storage Area Network (San)
• Shell Scripting
• Clariion
• Storage
• Enterprise Storage
• Virtualization
• Professional Services
• Iscsi
• Disaster Recovery
• Storage Area Networks
• Nas
• Data Center
• San
• Cloud Computing
• Storage Virtualization
• Emc Storage
• Storage Solutions
• Vmware
• Deduplication
• Brocade
• Storage Management
• Perl
• Storage Architecture