Principal Solutions Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

Principal Solutions Engineer
The Principal Solutions Engineer is a strategic technical leadership role responsible for translating complex business and customer requirements into innovative technical solutions that drive exceptional value for clients and internal stakeholders. This role bridges the gap between customer needs, product capabilities, and implementation teams—combining deep technical expertise with consultative problem-solving and forward-thinking architecture. The Principal Solutions Engineer will architect customer-facing solutions, guide implementation strategies, mentor technical teams, and champion best practices in solution design and delivery. Critically, this role operates proactively—anticipating customer needs, identifying infrastructure and framework gaps before they become constraints, and taking ownership of projects from initial exploration through successful delivery.
Duties and Responsibilities include but are not limited to the following:
CORE SOLUTIONING RESPONSIBILITIES
Conduct thorough discovery and needs analysis with enterprise clients to understand business challenges, desired outcomes, technical constraints, and market context, translating these into comprehensive solution specifications that exceed stated requirements where opportunities exist.
Architect customer-specific technical solutions that leverage platform capabilities while creatively addressing unique requirements, scalability needs, integration demands, and unarticulated customer problems—working beyond the minimum specification to deliver strategic value.
Identify and evaluate required frameworks, architectural patterns, infrastructure needs, and third-party tooling for projects before constraints materialize—recommending optimal stacks and infrastructure configurations early to prevent costly rework or performance bottlenecks.
Take ownership of projects from initial concept and "fleshing out" phases, independently defining scope, technical approach, and success criteria—then running with execution while maintaining proactive communication with stakeholders on progress, emerging questions, scope evolution, and key decisions.
Circle back to stakeholders frequently with transparent updates, risk assessments, trade-off analyses, and recommendations—communicating complex technical decisions in business terms and gathering input to ensure alignment throughout the engagement lifecycle.
Anticipate customer problems and opportunities by staying ahead of requirements, proactively surfacing potential challenges, recommending preventive design decisions, and suggesting enhancements that align with customer strategy and market dynamics.
Champion AI-forward thinking and practices in solution design, identifying opportunities to integrate generative AI, machine learning, and AI-powered automation tools into customer solutions to unlock new capabilities, improve efficiency, and provide competitive advantage. Stay current with AI tools and methodologies, recommend AI-native approaches when appropriate, and mentor teams on responsible AI implementation and integration.

TECHNICAL LEADERSHIP RESPONSIBILITIES
Lead and oversee the technical implementation strategy for complex customer deployments, ensuring alignment with project timelines, budgets, and expected outcomes while making autonomous technical decisions when necessary to maintain momentum.
Provide technical guidance and mentorship to implementation teams, support engineers, and customer technical staff to ensure successful solution deployment, adoption, and long-term value realization.
Establish and enforce solution design standards, best practices, and architectural patterns that ensure consistency, performance, security, and scalability across all customer deployments and implementations.
Act as the technical trusted advisor to clients, anticipating challenges, recommending optimization opportunities, demonstrating thought leadership in solution architecture, and building long-term partnerships based on strategic technical guidance.
Develop comprehensive technical documentation, solution designs, implementation guides, architecture diagrams, and training materials that communicate complex system designs to both technical and business stakeholders.
Evaluate emerging technologies, integration platforms, and third-party tools to recommend solutions that enhance competitive positioning, unlock new customer capabilities, and reduce total cost of ownership.
Identify and mitigate technical risks in solution designs, performing impact assessments and recommending safeguards to ensure systems are secure, compliant, and resilient to failures.
Partner with the CTO and product leadership to align customer feedback and solutioning insights with strategic product vision and long-term technical capabilities roadmap.

QUALIFICATIONS
Required Qualifications:
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field, or equivalent professional experience demonstrating deep technical expertise and architectural thinking.
Proficiency in multiple programming languages and frameworks across different technology stacks (e.g., Java, Python, C#/.NET, PHP, TypeScript, Go, or similar). Demonstrated ability to rapidly learn and apply new languages and frameworks as required by customer solutions.
Strong cloud platform experience with AWS, Azure, GCP, or equivalent—including hands-on work with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and cloud-native architecture patterns.
8 years of software engineering, architecture, or solutions engineering experience, with at least 3 years in technical leadership roles (team lead, engineering manager, senior architect, or solutions architect).
Demonstrated success taking strategic project ownership from early-stage conception through delivery—independently managing scope, technical decisions, stakeholder communication, and outcomes for complex, multi-month initiatives.
Proven track record mentoring engineers and technical teams; ability to elevate team performance and communicate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences (technical and business stakeholders).
Experience designing and architecting scalable, distributed systems with strong understanding of microservices, APIs, event-driven architecture, and system integration patterns.
Excellent communication skills with ability to translate technical complexity into clear, business-focused narratives and proactively manage stakeholder expectations.

Preferred Qualifications:
Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
Experience in healthcare, financial services, logistics, or other regulated/complex enterprise domains.
Hands-on experience with AI, machine learning, and generative AI tools; demonstrated ability to identify and integrate AI solutions into customer workflows.
DevOps and platform engineering experience; familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, observability, and infrastructure automation.
Experience managing direct reports and building/scaling engineering teams.
Product management or product ownership background; experience collaborating with product teams to shape roadmaps and feature prioritization.
Track record of driving quantified business impact through technical decisions (e.g., cost savings, efficiency gains, revenue acceleration).

ADDITIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES
Perform daily duties in line with Information Security Policies and Procedures.
Ensure that information Confidentiality, Integrity and Privacy is always maintained when processing information assets.