Centre of Excellence – RFP Manager

Job description

## **The Team** You will join DDN’s Global Centre of Excellence, a high-impact strategic function within the pre-sales organisation. Our mission is to help DDN win complex, high-value opportunities by equipping our field teams with the strategy, content, insights, and tools they need to stand out in competitive sales cycles. In this role, you will have a particular focus on building an AI-driven function to drive strategic RFPs and RFIs. You will work closely with Account Teams (including Solution Engineers & Sales), Product, and other cross-functional partners to turn complex customer requirements into compelling, differentiated proposals that clearly articulate the value of DDN’s solutions. This is a role for someone who combines pre-sales, proposal expertise, commercial judgement, technical curiosity, and a builder mindset. You will not simply manage an established RFP process; you will re-architect from the ground up to make it smarter, faster, and more scalable through automation and AI. ## **Key Responsibilities** - **Strategic RFP & Proposal Management:** Own and orchestrate high-priority RFPs and RFIs from kickoff through submission. Partner with Account Teams and technical stakeholders to establish the response strategy, manage timelines, identify gaps, and ensure a cohesive, high-quality final proposal. - **DDN Value & Differentiation:** Develop a deep understanding of DDN’s products, solutions, and competitive advantages. Translate technical capabilities into clear, customer-relevant value propositions that differentiate DDN in competitive evaluations. - **Proposal Strategy:** Go beyond coordinating content. Help shape the overall response strategy, including win themes, executive messaging, competitive positioning, customer-specific proof points, and responses to high-priority requirements. - **Cross-Functional Orchestration:** Bring together contributors across Sales, Solution Engineering, Product, Marketing, and other subject-matter teams. Keep stakeholders aligned and ensure that complex technical information becomes a clear and compelling customer response. - **AI & Proposal Automation:** Identify repetitive or manual parts of the RFP process and build scalable solutions to improve them. Use AI and automation to accelerate content discovery, response generation, knowledge retrieval, proposal reviews, and other parts of the proposal lifecycle. - **Build Once, Enable Many:** Turn lessons from individual RFPs into reusable assets, templates, knowledge, and self-service tools that improve proposal quality and efficiency across the broader DDN field. - **Continuous Improvement:** Analyse proposal outcomes and feedback to identify opportunities to improve DDN’s RFP process, content, and competitive positioning over time. ## **What Success Looks Like** In this role, you will help DDN: - Submit stronger, more differentiated responses to strategic RFPs. - Make complex DDN technology easier for customers to understand and value. - Reduce the manual effort required to produce high-quality proposals. - Build reusable proposal content, knowledge, and AI-powered tools that scale across the organisation. - Give Account Teams a clear and compelling story for why DDN is the right choice. ## **Requirements** - **Experience:** 3+ years of experience in solution engineering, proposal management, technical pre-sales, management consulting, or a related role in a fast-paced technology environment. - **RFP/RFI Experience:** Experience managing or responding to complex technical RFPs or RFIs in enterprise technology or B2B software/hardware. - **AI & Automation:** Hands-on experience using AI tools, LLMs, workflow automation, or knowledge-management systems to improve business processes (such as RFP). - **Builder DNA:** You naturally look for ways to eliminate repetitive work. You are interested in using AI, automation, and better processes to make proposal teams more effective. - **Communication:** Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to turn complex technical information into clear, persuasive customer-facing content. ## **Nice to Have** - **Technical Foundation:** Basic knowledge of SQL, Python, APIs, or other technologies used to build or automate workflows. - **Workflow Orchestration:** Experience with platforms such as Make, n8n, Zapier, or similar automation tools. - **Knowledge & RAG:** Familiarity with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enterprise knowledge bases, or grounding AI agents in proprietary company data. - **Entrepreneurial Mindset:** Experience building a side project, internal tool, small business, or other initiative from idea through execution.