Principal Customer Architect

Responsibilities:

Account Architecture:
• Design the end-to-end agent architecture across the customer's journeys and channels — chat, email, voice, SMS, in-app — including agent decomposition, escalation and handoff design, and how autonomous and human-in-the-loop modes divide the work.
• Design the integration blueprint against the customer's real stack: CRM and ticketing (Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow), telephony and contact center, identity, loyalty and reservations systems, order and payments, and data platform.
• Set the guardrail, governance, and observability architecture: define what the agent must never do, how that is enforced, how it is audited, and what the customer's compliance and risk teams see.
• Set the architecture and governance standard the Agentic Deployment team executes against, and own quality sign-off before anything reaches production.
Technical Success Planning:
• Author and maintain a Technical Success Plan per account: current-state architecture, target-state architecture, the sequenced roadmap between them, and the metrics defining success at each stage.
• Define the measurement model with the customer up front — containment, resolution rate, CSAT/DSAT, deflection economics, handle time, escalation quality, cost per resolution — and hold both sides to it.
• Run a recurring technical business review with customer leadership: what shipped, what it moved, what's next, and what's at risk.
Adoption & Technical Expansion:
• Own the technical expansion path for land-and-expand: chat to email to voice to employee-facing, plus new intents, lines of business, regions, and languages.
• Identify expansion opportunities from technical reality rather than wishful mapping, size the work honestly, and hand qualified opportunity to the account team.
• Anticipate what breaks at the next order of magnitude — peak-event volume, new policy regimes, upstream system migrations — and get ahead of it in the roadmap.
Trusted Technical Advisor: 
• Hold the primary technical relationship with senior stakeholders: VP/Head of Customer Experience, Director of Contact Center Technology, enterprise architects, security and compliance leadership, and often the CIO.
• Advise on the parts of the program Netomi doesn't own — knowledge base quality, policy clarity, agent operating model, org readiness — because agent performance depends on all of it.
• Deliver hard technical news early and clearly. Credibility is built on accurate expectation-setting, not optimism.
Partner Co-Delivery: 
• Set the architecture and quality standard that SI delivery partners build against.
• Certify and enable partner delivery teams; scale through them rather than absorbing all delivery work.
• Maintain quality sign-off regardless of who executes.
Prescriptive Playbooks: 
• Contribute to vertical deployment blueprints — airline, insurance, gaming, media — covering reference architecture, guardrail configuration, evaluation packs, and expansion paths.
• Turn what works in one account into prescriptive onboarding and day-2 playbooks the whole organization deploys from.
Product Collaboration: 
• Translate field observation into specific, evidenced, pattern-based product input — quantified, not anecdotal.
• Be a named internal voice on enterprise requirements: security posture, deployment topology, model flexibility, and auditability.
Escalation & Incident Response: 
• Lead the technical side of escalations: quality regressions, integration failures, and incidents during peak events.
• Drive root-cause analysis with Engineering and communicate it to the customer with precision and appropriate accountability.
Function-Level Technical Leadership: 
• Define and own the architecture, governance, and quality standards for the Customer Architect function: reference architectures, guardrail patterns, evaluation frameworks, and sign-off criteria.
• Own the hardest technical problems in the portfolio — first-of-kind deployments, peak-event scale, novel compliance regimes — and convert their solutions into function-wide standards.
• Mentor Senior and staff-level Customer Architects; act as the escalation point for architecture decisions across accounts.
• Represent Customer Engineering's technical position to executive leadership, Product, and Engineering, and shape platform direction based on aggregate field evidence.

Requirements:

• 12+ years in customer-facing technical roles — solutions architecture, technical account management, forward-deployed engineering, implementation architecture, or technical consulting — including sustained ownership of post-sales technical outcomes.
• Recognized technical authority at prior companies: the architect others escalated to, with demonstrated ownership of the largest and most complex enterprise accounts at Fortune 500 scale.
• Genuine technical depth: reads code and API documentation, reasons about distributed systems and integration architecture, debugs a failing data flow, and holds their own with a customer's principal engineer.
• Working understanding of LLM-based systems — prompting, tool use, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, failure modes — and judgment about where they are and aren't the right answer.
• Consultative and prescriptive: builds playbooks, not one-offs.
• Moves between a CIO conversation about business outcomes and an engineering conversation about trace-level agent behavior without losing either audience.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward writing things down.
• Track record defining architecture standards, methodologies, or playbooks adopted beyond your own accounts — at practice, function, or company level.
• Experience influencing product direction at an enterprise software company through structured, evidenced field input.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience co-delivering through SI partners — enabling delivery teams rather than doing all the work directly.
• CX, contact center, or conversational AI background — CCaaS, CRM/ticketing ecosystems, IVR and voice, workforce management.
• Depth in a core vertical: airlines and travel, media and streaming, gaming and sports betting, financial services and insurance, or retail.
• Familiarity with enterprise security and compliance — SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, ISO 27001 — without escalating to Legal for every question.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks or quality programs for non-deterministic systems.