Senior Manager, Solution Architect
Klaviyo has a unique take on the Solution Architect role. While most companies hire SAs to give demos, fill out questionnaires, and explain complicated setups, that makes us yawn. We built a product that anyone can use (just ask our more than 80,000 customers) and we have smart sales reps and customer success colleagues who are true product experts.
So what do we do? We work directly with a small percentage of prospective and existing customers, alongside our sales & customer success teams, as customer-facing engineers to accelerate complex deals and customer value. We use these engagements as an opportunity to learn, prototype, and ship meaningful improvements to the Klaviyo experience. We look for interesting problems and aim for solutions that are extensible and reusable.
A few things our team has recently built as part of sales and customer engagements include: new productized integrations; modular ETL packages; a library of custom functions for importing data via API into Google Sheets; demo environments that continuously receive data in real-time; and an internal app to organize competitive intelligence. In short, we are problem-solvers and builders. We believe easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible.
As a leader of the Solution Architect organization you’ll build and lead teams of entrepreneurial engineers that get excited by imagining new features, prototyping solutions, and incubating new technologies - all within the context of actual customer engagements. As a Senior Manager you’ll also be responsible for mentoring and training team members in areas of opportunities and growth.
We look for leaders that have extraordinary substance, vision, care, and standards of performance. You’ll bring substance by leveraging applied experience in engineering and customer roles to coach team members. You’ll show vision and care by demonstrating a strategic mindset and dedicating yourself to growth, development, and guidance of your team. And you’ll be a force multiplier by establishing operational discipline and motivating the team to meet exceptionally high standards of performance.
This is an opportunity to be a leader on an extremely high-performing, strategically-important team that works at the exciting intersection of product, engineering, sales, and customer success. We will do this by empowering the teams by giving them the clear vision, direction, and support they need to grow and be successful in helping our customers accelerate and see immediate value.
How You'll Make a Difference:
- Lead and manage a team of Solution Architects specializing on the Mid-Market / Enterprise segment and on our partner ecosystem. Own hiring, staffing, career development, and performance management for team members.
- Collaborate with the Director of Solution Architecture to manage the planning and direction of the Solution Architect organization through clear goal setting, objectives, plans of execution and team metrics. Responsible for ensuring the goals cascade to all workers.
- Raise the technical bar for the team by leveraging engineering experience and relevant industry & domain knowledge to coach team members. Use sales and project management experience to create repeatable patterns for driving success. Continuously challenge the team to learn more.
- Collaborate cross-functionally - e.g. with Customer Success, Product, Engineering - to understand and evangelize emerging customer use cases.
- Report out monthly to the Director of Solution Architecture on key metrics, highlights, areas of risk and areas for opportunity, both in context of the Sales organization and the SA function more generally. You’ll need to have a strong ability to systematically break down complex problems and view them through a strategic lens.
- Create an inclusive culture through leading by example with being humble and open-minded, and operating with high integrity by being open to feedback.
Who You Are:
- 8+ years of experience in engineering / pre-sales roles, ideally within SaaS & MarTech
- Experience designing strategies to drive success with technical stakeholders at enterprise accounts
- Strong domain knowledge in several of the following areas: MarTech, eCommerce, analytics, data engineering, systems integration
- 5+ years leading technical, project-based teams, ideally in a pre-Sales and/or engineering organization within a high growth SaaS company
- Experience managing distributed teams remotely is a plus
- Someone who embraces failure as an opportunity to improve
- Someone who reliably makes and meets commitments
- Applied engineering experience with several of the following: web development languages (e.g. HTML, CSS, Javascript); REST APIs; web app development frameworks (e.g. React, Node, Angular, Vue, etc.); or general-purpose programming language (e.g. Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.).
- Proven ability to track the technical landscape and deeply understand new domains.
At Klaviyo we value the unique backgrounds, experiences and perspectives each Klaviyo (we call ourselves Klaviyos) brings to our workplace each and every day. We believe everyone deserves a fair shot at success and appreciate the experiences each person brings beyond the traditional job requirements. If you’re a close but not exact match with the description, we hope you’ll still consider applying.
Get to Know Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a world-leading marketing automation platform dedicated to accelerating revenue and customer connection for online businesses. Klaviyo makes it easy to store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications. The company's hybrid customer-data and marketing-platform model allows companies to grow by fostering direct relationships with customers, without giving up their valuable data to popular big-tech ad platforms. Over 265,000 innovative companies like Unilever, Custom Ink, Living Proof and Huckberry sell more with Klaviyo. Learn more at www.klaviyo.com.
Klaviyo is committed to diversity and to a policy of equal employment opportunity and non-discrimination. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.