Sr. Mgr, Solutions Architect

Who we are. Solo enables companies to Connect, Secure and Observe modern applications – APIs, Microservices and Data – with the industry’s leading API and Service Mesh Management Platform (“Gloo”). Solo innovations allow companies to stay on the leading edge of both technology and business possibilities. Solo is a VC-backed company, founded in 2017 by Idit Levine. In 2021, Solo was valued at $1B. Solo’s customers are some of the largest in the world, spanning all geographies and industries. Solo’s team has deep expertise in Cloud Computing, Linux, Containers, Kubernetes, Service Mesh, APIs, Security, Microservice Applications, Application Modernization, GraphQL, and eBPF. About the role. As the manager of the Solutions Architect team at Solo.io, you'll be responsible for the team that delivers on technical projects that ensure our customers get the maximum value out of our offerings. While product onboarding and adoption is a core focus, responsibilities include help with migrations, feature adoption and any technical problem whose scope is larger than what can reasonably be worked through a support ticket. Our customers are some of the most knowledgeable platform engineers and software developers in the world, and your job is to work with them on how to best architect solutions using Solo products. Job Description Lead and develop a team of Solutions Architects across different regions and time zones responsible for driving customer adoption, retention, and expansion of Solo products and platform capabilities. Deliver on customer facing projects of varying complexity and scope depending on the needs of our customers such as initial onboarding, complex upgrades or architectural changes. Serve as the primary technical point of contact in a player-coach model for a small portfolio of strategic accounts, developing deep familiarity with their use cases, architecture, teams, and business goals. Lead technical issue resolution end-to-end, partnering with Support and Engineering on escalations and driving root-cause analysis. Provide hands-on troubleshooting within your accounts where it accelerates resolution and deepens customer trust. Guide customers as they extend Solo.io products to support modern workloads — including AI and agentic use cases such as LLM gateways, agent-to-agent communication, and securing model traffic at scale. Proactively drive product adoption by identifying new use cases and surfacing opportunities for customers to gain more value from the Solo.io product suite. Consult with customers on architectural best practices, performance tuning, and operational excellence in their Solo.io deployments. Design and deliver tailored training sessions, workshops, and enablement content to grow customer self-sufficiency. Champion the customer inside Solo.io — translating their needs into actionable feedback for Product Management and Engineering. Partner with the account team (CSM, AE, SE) to identify and manage technical risk, renewal health, and expansion opportunities. Job Requirements 3+ years direct people management experience in leading technical ICs and/or customer facing architecture teams. 5+ years in a customer-facing technical role such as Solutions Architect, Customer Success Engineer, Site Reliability Engineer, or Senior Support Engineer. Deep expertise in cloud-native technologies, including Kubernetes, service mesh (e.g., Istio, Cilium), and API gateways and proxies (e.g., Envoy, Gloo Gateway). 1+ years of hands-on experience with AI/ML technologies — LLMs, agentic frameworks, model-serving platforms, or AI infrastructure. Proven track record managing technical relationships with large, strategic enterprise customers in a post-sales context. Excellent troubleshooting instincts and the ability to navigate complex, multi-team production environments. Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for audiences ranging from platform engineers to senior executives. Comfort with scripting or programming (e.g., Go, Python, Bash) for diagnostics, automation, and reference implementations. Bachelor's degree in a technical field, or equivalent industry experience. What you’ll love about Solo. At Solo, our culture is all about hiring great people, creating a fun and fast-paced work culture, and letting our teams work with our customers to successfully solve their challenges. Solo works collaboratively with our customers, partners and open source communities to deliver technology innovation, technology solutions, architectural best-practices, and hands-on education. Solo uses a unique engagement model with our customers that allows us to quickly make them successful, and continue to work closely with them as their production environments grow. Solo is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, or protected veteran status and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability.