Solutions Architect, SMB

Location: Chicago

Department: 1150 Solutions Architecture

Who we are

About Stripe

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach while doing the most important work of your career.

About the team

Stripe’s SMB Solutions Architecture (SA) team works with technical and business leaders (CTO/ CIO/ CEO/ Founders etc.), payments leaders and product engineering teams in the SMB segment to evangelize Stripe’s solutions in the market. A solutions architect’s role is to build relationships with decision makers and think strategically about the business needs of Stripe’s customers. Solution Architects identify and propose Stripe solutions to solve complex business challenges and drive growth for our customers. SMB SAs establish and prescribe best practices around a customer’s strategy, provide business and technical thought leadership and are viewed as a trusted advisor. They work on scaling business processes aligned to maximizing account coverage while working closely with customer and partner resources to deliver a solution that can be adopted quickly.

What you’ll do

As a member of the team, the Solutions Architect will build highly consultative trusted relationships with c-level executives and technical decision makers in the customer’s organization to provide business and technical thought leadership, and become a trusted advisor in solving mission-critical business challenges. She/he will architect business models with them so they can drive new monetization opportunities and growth for both the user and Stripe. 

Responsibilities 

• Drive thought leadership and build executive relationships with key business and technical stakeholders including CIO, CTO, COO, CRO, CDO & Head of Payments. Strive to become their trusted advisor
• Work to deeply understand the customer’s business objectives and apply Stripe’s payments, SaaS, Banking-as-a-Service and Link Network solutions to customer challenges 
• Secure the technical win for Stripe’s products by delivering demos, responding to RFPs, evangelizing Stripe’s products, and collaborating internally on narratives that align with the customer’s goals
• Creating scalable processes (1:M customer engagements, Webinars, office hours etc), partnerships (with external and internal partners) and scaled assets (reusable videos/ templates) in order to act as a force-multiplier in the sales process  
• Expand Stripe’s footprint within existing accounts to new global markets and business units by introducing new capabilities and local payment methods
• Collaborate with multiple internal stakeholders including go-to-market, product and marketing to deliver impactful EBC briefings for SMB accounts
• Act as the voice of the customer to inform our product team on insights, trends, and opportunities across our SMB accounts.
• Work closely with professional services and partners to accelerate activations and time to live
• Collaborate with partners to help Stripe scale and reach its Total Addressable Market
• Approximately 25% travel is anticipated to help you connect in-person in a meaningful way with users and collaborate internally

Who you are

An ideal candidate should have experience working for medium to large software companies (preferably in In payment-tech), focused on identifying business priorities, technology strategy, and solution design.

They will have demonstrated the ability to become a trusted advisor to senior executives and facilitate customer success including business value identification(discovery/ demo cycles), road mapping, as well as advising and defining successful execution strategies.

Ideal candidates have external customer-facing experience, have payment expertise (preferred but not required) who can present and architect Stripe’s solutions, and persuade decision makers to leverage Stripe technology to drive business value. Candidates have previous experience in web architecture, enterprise architecture or experience defining and optimizing financial business processes. 

Minimum requirements

• 5+ years of total relevant experience (software development, enterprise sales/ architecture, business development etc.)
• 2+ years of experience in a similar customer-facing engineering role (e.g. solutions architect, sales engineer, customer success, professional services delivery) for a fin-tech/payment-tech/global software enterprise
• Experience as a customer facing roles - presenting and architecting solutions. Domain experience in the payments space is preferred 
• Deep understanding or background in SDLC and understanding of REST APIs. Experience in writing code in at least 2 of the following languages: Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java, Go, etc. is preferred 
• Outstanding oral and written communication skills, presentation skills, and comfortable explaining complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Able and willing to learn Stripe solutions (Payments, Billing, Connect, etc.) 
• Ability  to understand how a wide variety of technologies and systems interact with each other (ERP, CRM, Billing, Tax, Legacy) 
• Executive engagement skills and presence, with an ability to establish strong relationships with key decision makers and build credibility at all levels
• Strong organizational/time management skills and the ability to juggle competing priorities while working with multiple opportunities and customers
• Strong collaboration skills to work seamlessly with the broader GTM team to support our users
• Experience solving open ended business problems with a combination of technology and creative thinking
• Ability to travel per business needs