Pre-Sales Lead — BFSI

About the AI & Analytics Practice

AI & Analytics is at the heart of Tavant — it accounts for roughly half of our business and powers the most advanced work we deliver. This is not a nascent capability we are standing up; it is a mature, market-leading practice that runs AI in production for our clients every day. Our work spans generative AI, agentic automation, machine vision, deep learning, natural language processing, and reinforcement learning, built on modern data platforms — lakes, warehouses, lakehouses, and meshes — across every major cloud. Clients bring us their hardest, most strategic problems because we have the depth, the track record, and the engineering muscle to solve them at scale. You will join an established, high-caliber team and help shape where the practice goes next.

The Role

AI & Analytics is one of Tavant's largest businesses and the engine of our most cutting-edge client work, and we're looking for an AI & Analytics Pre-Sales Lead to extend that leadership across our Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI) accounts out of Dallas or Austin. This is the equivalent of a pre-sales lead in a professional-services organization: you own the technical win. You will set the solution strategy, shape offerings, partner with our industry sales teams to win deals, and work with our engineers to turn battle-tested assets into client solutions. It's a client-facing, high-visibility role that blends business insight, communication, and hands-on technical credibility, with roughly 30% travel to client sites and industry events.

Responsibilities

•    Lead the technical pre-sales motion for AI & Analytics across BFSI accounts: discovery, requirements analysis, solution shaping, and win strategy.

•    Personally build demos, prototypes, and proofs-of-concept using generative and agentic AI to show clients the "art of the possible" — creating conviction early in the sales cycle rather than waiting on delivery teams.

•    Serve as a strategic advisor to client executives on AI adoption, data-platform modernization, capability roadmaps, and process automation.

•    Shape the practice's offerings for the vertical — defining IP, custom service offerings, target markets, and the lead-generation approach — and help industry sales teams identify the best targets in their territories.

•    Drive the creation of proposals, RFP/RFI responses, value narratives, ROI models, and client-facing collateral, and pitch our expertise at sales meetings, executive briefings, and conferences.

•    Facilitate AI strategy workshops, ideation sessions, and deep-dive assessments that translate operational pain points into AI-feasible, high-value use cases.

•    Partner with solution architects, data scientists, and engineering/DataOps/MLOps teams to produce demos, PoCs, pilots, and accelerators, and to extend the reusable IP that scales across multiple clients.

•    Contribute to practice sales targets (supporting the salespeople, who are the primary owners of quota) and produce thought leadership and verticalized offerings that reinforce Tavant’s leadership in the market.

Requirements

•    Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or demonstration of equivalent conceptual knowledge through self-study and prior experience; advanced degree preferred.

•    10+ years of experience overall, including substantial time in pre-sales, solution consulting, practice leadership, or business development for data & analytics solutions.

•    Demonstrated pre-sales track record: leading workshops, crafting proposals, shaping solutions, and supporting complex deal cycles to close.

•    Hands-on ability to rapidly build working demos and prototypes with generative and agentic AI tooling — you can show the art of the possible yourself, not just direct others to do it.

•    Experience designing and positioning data & analytics platforms at significant scale.

•    Working knowledge of modern AI techniques (predictive modeling, generative AI, document intelligence, agentic automation) — enough to know what's possible and practical and to guide clients on using it to drive business impact.

•    Understanding of cloud and distributed-systems principles, and experience across cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, including container and orchestration technologies.

•    Familiarity with Banking, Financial Services, and/or Insurance is strongly preferred.

•    Excellent written and oral communication, executive-facing presentation, and interpersonal skills, with comfort operating in ambiguity and bringing structure to open-ended problems.

•    Willingness to travel approximately 30%.