Solutions Architect, SF

Description

The company raised a $250M Series C led by a16z, with existing investors Benchmark, Lightspeed, and YC also investing. The round puts the valuation at $2.2 billion.

The company builds a search engine for AI systems. Its Search API is used by agents, Fortune 500 companies, and AI labs.

The team is about 100 people, mostly based in SF. Members come from Harvard, MIT, Meta, Google Research, earlier startups, and people who left university to build companies.

This is a presales role in which you are the technical lead on new deals. You work with Account Executives from the first call until the technical win. You are measured on technical wins, POC conversion, and how quickly pipeline moves.

Responsibilities

• Take the technical lead on new opportunities with Account Executives, from the first call through to the technical win.
• Run discovery to learn a prospect's use case, architecture, data needs, and success criteria, then decide whether the company's product is a good fit.
• Build demos, sample apps, and prototypes tailored to the prospect's own problem.
• Design and run workshops and POCs with clear success criteria, timelines, and evaluation plans, and push them toward a decision.
• Benchmark the product against alternatives on quality, latency, and cost, and make the technical case for it.
• Answer objections and questions about security, compliance, and architecture.
• Bring in Forward Deployed Engineers when a deal needs deeper specialist knowledge, and hand the customer to them after close with everything needed to reach production quickly.
• Pass market feedback to Product: what prospects ask for, where deals are lost, and what would help win them.
• Create reusable presales assets such as demo environments, reference architectures, and evaluation playbooks.

Requirements

• Several years of hands-on programming experience. You can build strong demos, deliver POCs end to end, and design and run rigorous head-to-head evaluations.
• At least 2 years of hands-on presales or technical sales work, ideally at an AI-native or developer-first company. You have owned the technical side of deals, run discovery and demos with technical buyers, and helped deals close.
• Clear communication. You can tailor your message to CTOs, engineers, and PMs, and explain complex technology in simple terms.
• A record of high performance in demanding settings, such as a top computer science program, competitive sport, a startup, or another field.
• Comfort switching context often, working with ambiguity, and keeping up intensity over time.
• Willingness to travel for customer meetings and workshops.

Conditions

This is an in-person role in San Francisco.

The company will sponsor international candidates for work authorization such as STEM OPT, OPT, H1B, O1, and E3.

You might excel if you have worked as a solutions architect, solutions engineer, or sales engineer at a developer tools, API, or AI company.

You might excel if you have built with LLMs, RAG, or agents and can discuss retrieval and search quality with confidence.

You might excel if you have helped close revenue or driven commercial results at a previous company.

You might excel if you do well in early-stage teams where the job changes often.

You might excel if you enjoy the moment a prospect sees a demo and understands it.

You might excel if you care about organizing the world's knowledge and making it accessible to machines.

Benefits

• Premium healthcare coverage, including medical, dental, and vision.
• Fertility benefits.
• A monthly wellness stipend for all employees.