Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture

About the Team and Role:

Klaviyo has a unique take on the Solution Architect role. While most companies hire SAs to give routine 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 150,000 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 teams, as customer-facing engineers and technical sellers 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. In short, we are problem-solvers, builders, and consultants. We believe easy things should be easy and hard things should be possible.

As a leader in the Solution Architect organization, you’ll build and lead a team of entrepreneurial engineers that love both building and selling. As a Sr. Manager, you’ll also be responsible for hiring, onboarding, training, and coaching team members to deliver a world-class consultative sales experience.

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 the 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, and sales. 

How You’ll Make A Difference: 

• Lead and manage a team of Solution Architects that partner with Account Executives. Own hiring, staffing, career development, and performance management for team members. For example, you’ll run team meetings, 1:1s, and monthly lookbacks for the team to ensure we are constantly learning, knowledge-sharing, celebrating successes and getting better.
• Perform pipeline reviews, deal reviews, and call coaching to develop your team - and provide hands-on support to deal teams when needed to accelerate success. You’ll stay close to lots of deals while also owning presales technical forecasting for the APAC region.
• Drive product field alignment through collecting product gaps, presenting insights, and bringing roadmap prioritization context back to the team.
• Collaborate with global Solution Architecture leadership 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, especially those that affect your region. Specifically, you’ll need to play an important role interfacing with R&D to advocate for product investments that drive regional success.
• Report out to the global leadership 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.
• Performs other related duties as assigned.

Who You Are:

• • 4+ years of experience managing high-performing teams in engineering / pre-sales / sales roles with demonstrated success in recruiting, hiring, and talent development
  • A demonstrated history of excellent operational rigor, both individually and at the team-level
  • Someone who has exceptional business acumen and a proven ability to build strong relationships with senior-level stakeholders across multiple functional domains (e.g. Sales, Customer Success, R&D)
  • Experience designing strategies to drive success with technical stakeholders
  • Strong domain knowledge in several of the following areas:  MarTech, eCommerce, customer data platforms, analytics, data engineering, mobile apps, systems integration
  • Experience with several of the following:  web development languages (e.g. HTML, CSS, Javascript); REST APIs; mobile app development (e.g. iOS, Android; React Native) or general-purpose programming languages (e.g. Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.).
  • Someone who embraces failure as an opportunity to improve
  • Someone who reliably makes and meets commitments
  • Proven ability to track the technical landscape and deeply understand new domains