Principal Solutions Architect

Job Description

The Company

The client is a U.S. technology company that applies AI and advanced analytics to large, complex data, giving government customers a clearer picture of the environments they operate in. The client's software is in use across federal agencies today. Our U.S. team is cleared and growing, and we support customers in both unclassified and classified environments.

Overview

This is the senior-most technical role on our U.S. Government team, and it is an individual-contributor seat - you will coach solutions engineers, but you will not carry direct reports. You work opposite the sales directors, and you own whether we win on technical merit.

Half the job is pre-sales at the top end: discovery, demonstrations, pilots, evaluations, and technical volumes. The other half is forward-deployed engineering - getting inside the customer's environment, wiring the platform into their data and their workflow, and making it useful where the work actually happens, classified environments included.

You are also where technical leverage comes from for everyone else. The demo environments, reference architectures, and reusable assets you build are what the rest of the team sells with.

Responsibilities

• Set and execute solution strategy on the hardest pursuits, from first discovery through pilot, technical proposal, and award.
• Demonstrations, workshops, and proofs of concept; agree on success criteria before an evaluation starts rather than after; qualify hard alongside sales and take technical risk out of a deal early.
• Sit with users during pilots and early fieldings - configuring, integrating APIs and data, prototyping workflows, and clearing whatever blocks adoption.
• Data flows, integration patterns, enrichment of customer and partner data, and deployment across commercial cloud, GovCloud, and classified enclaves, with accreditation and ATO realities factored in from the start.
• Demo infrastructure, reference architectures, technical collateral, and repeatable evaluation frameworks the team reuses. Raise the standard of the solutions engineers around you.
• Carry what you learn in the field back to Product and Engineering as specific, defensible input rather than anecdote.
• Technical volumes and solution content for RFIs, RFPs, evaluations, and teaming conversations with primes and integrators.

Required Skills

• Ten or more years in solutions architecture, sales engineering, or forward-deployed engineering delivering software, data, or AI to federal customers - with evaluations you won
• Real hands-on depth: APIs and integration patterns, data pipelines, analytics and AI, modern cloud - enough to build the demonstration yourself rather than narrate someone else's
• Experience fielding and accrediting software in government environments; working familiarity with ATO, security requirements, and classified networks
• Mission fluency in defense, intelligence, or law enforcement - able to hold the room with analysts, operators, and program leadership and turn what you hear into a design
• Range that runs from a whiteboard with two engineers to a briefing for a senior government executive
• A track record of standing up pre-sales capability from scratch: playbooks, demo infrastructure, mentoring
• Comfort doing the work yourself while lifting the standard around you, across Sales, Product, Engineering, Delivery, and Customer Success

Desired Skills

• Analytics and AI applied to large, complex datasets
• Fusion of commercial data with government sources and holdings
• API and platform integration into customer systems and analytic workflows
• Deployment across commercial cloud, GovCloud, and classified enclaves
• Support to analytic, operational, and investigative workflows

Additional Details

Active TS/SCI strongly preferred; an active Secret clearance with a path to TS/SCI is the minimum. Washington, D.C. metro strongly preferred. Regular travel to customer sites.

Equal opportunity employer.