Bill Plein

About Bill Plein

I am a pre-sales Cloud Native architect focused on making Kubernetes and data infrastructure boring, reliable, and production-ready for large enterprises. I work with customers who are modernizing critical applications and KubeVirt virtualization on platforms like Red Hat OpenShift, Spectro Clound VMO, Azure, AWS and GCP, helping them design and deploy Portworx-based architectures that meet strict requirements for performance, availability, and data protection across on‑premises and cloud. I first joined Pure Storage in 2013, as the first Pure Sales Engineer in the southern half of Texas, exceeding targets for the first 3 years in territory. I am known as a “boomerang”, having left Pure Storage for a startup in the cloud-native market, and then returning less than 3 years later.Since re-joining Pure Storage in 2020, I’ve partnered with some of our most demanding accounts, including global retailers, large financial institutions, and telecommunications providers—to lead architecture workshops, design POCs, and take platforms into production at scale.Internally, I’m a bridge between field, product, and support. I am responsible for a growing list of accounts strategic to the growth of Pure Storage and the Portworx brand.I’m at my best when I’m sitting with customers and sales teams, whiteboarding architectures, unblocking escalations, and turning complicated requirements into clear, repeatable patterns the broader organization can adopt.

Experience

1. Principal Cloud Native Architect (Sales) - Portworx by Pure Storage

   Pure Storage

   Apr 2025 — Present · Austin, TX, US

   Continuing my growth and journey in the world of cloud native applications with the Portworx team at Pure Storage, with greater focus on strategic accounts.

Education

• University of California, Davis

  Bachelor of Arts, Economics

• Harvey Mudd College

  Attended, Physics, Engineering

Skills

• Switches
• Hardware
• Virtualization
• Networking
• Disaster Recovery
• Storage Area Networks
• Storage Virtualization
• San
• High Availability
• Sales Engineering
• Pre-Sales
• Storage Architecture
• Storage
• Tcp/Ip
• Enterprise Storage
• Enterprise Software
• Brocade
• Data Center
• Fibre Channel
• Storage Solutions
• Iscsi
• Perl
• System Architecture
• Cisco Technologies
• Ssd