$350,000–$450,000
Solutions Architect
Published · Updated
Pay not postedMenlo Park, CAOn-site
Own technical customer engagements from discovery through deployment, translating school and district needs into tailored solutions built on the company's infrastructure.
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At a glance
Posted base pay
Not posted
Median $190K
Typical senior FDE payMiddle 50% of 1,803 postings$160K–$220KThe work
Builds what the customer runs
Balance
- Mostly building
- Mixed
- Mostly pre-sales or support
Project stages
- Pre-sales
- Proof of concept
- Implementation
- Operations (not covered)
- Coding
- Writes production code
- Builds for
- External customers
- Level
- Senior
- Role
- Technical lead
What they ask for
Experience
Background
Tools
Less common in FDE jobs
- Company size: About 1–50 people13%
- Covers pre-sales25%
- On-site37%
- Covers proofs of concept40%
Share of US FDE postings that state each fact.
The job description from Lirvana Labs
Posted by Lirvana Labs on
About Us
Lirvana Labs builds AI-native solutions that personalize learning, empower educators, and deliver measurable impact in K-12 education. Our flagship product, Yeti Confetti Kids, is an AI-powered personalized learning and teaching co-pilot for early numeracy and literacy — spanning 200+ skills across English Literacy, Mathematical Reasoning, and Social-Emotional Learning, aligned to Common Core, CASEL, and Bloom's Taxonomy. We give parents and teachers actionable insight into each child's cognitive, social, and emotional development.
Founded in 2021 and backed by Kapor Capital, Transcend Capital Partners, and Chingona Ventures, we're a small, fast-moving team turning cutting-edge AI and cognitive research into learning experiences that schools and families trust.
About the Role
We're seeking a Modern Product person in the agentic world, a Solutions Architect to own the technical heart of our customer relationships — from discovery through delivery using agentic software practices. You'll sit at the intersection of product, engineering, and sales, and you'll be the person who turns a qualified opportunity into a deployed, working solution that solves a real district or school problem.
This is a high-ownership, high-autonomy role with a strong bias toward action. You won't just diagram a solution — you'll build it on top of our infrastructure, own it end to end, and close the deal. You'll report directly to the Head of Product and partner closely with Sales, Engineering, and DevOps.
If you're energized by being in the room with principals and superintendents one day and writing code against our platform the next, this role is for you.
What You’ll Do
Run technical discovery. After Sales qualifies an opportunity, lead discovery with the customer to deeply understand their pain points and translate them into concrete user stories and requirements.
Map pain to solution. Determine how our existing solutions — with light, well-scoped customization — can solve the customer's problem. Know our architecture cold: what's flexible and easy to customize, and what's hard or off-limits.
Build and own solutions. Write code on top of our infrastructure to deliver the solution. Own it end to end, from design through deployment and handoff.
Close the deal. Partner with Sales to drive opportunities to close. Your technical credibility and clear articulation of value are what get the deal across the line.
Communicate timelines clearly — to customers and internally. Set expectations honestly and keep all sides aligned.
Feed the roadmap. When an opportunity requires net-new infrastructure or capabilities, work with the Head of Product, Head of Engineering Management, and DevOps to scope it and determine how (and whether) it fits the roadmap.
Work directly with school leaders — principals, superintendents, and administrators — building trust and translating between their world and ours.
Who You Are
Technical translator and builder. You can take a customer's user stories and turn them into specific, buildable solutions — and then build them yourself. You're comfortable owning code in production.
Strong bias toward action. You move quickly, make decisions, and unblock yourself. You'd rather ship a scoped solution than perfect a slide.
Entrepreneurial, high ownership and autonomy. You take full responsibility for outcomes and don't need to be managed closely.
Exceptional communicator. You explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders, and you set and communicate timelines crisply — externally and internally.
Customer-trusted. You work well with senior education stakeholders and build credibility fast.
A leader of people. You've been a team lead and have mentored junior full-stack engineers.
Technical Background
As a Solutions Architect, you will be a hands-on in creating prototypes and implementing solutions. You will thrive in this role if you have at least:
- 3+ years of software development experience with mid-level proficiency
- Experience designing and building distributed, fault-tolerant computing architectures.
- Intermediate SQL and Python, Java, or Rust skills — able to read, write, and debug implementation code independently.
- Development experience with RAG and agentic workflows, building GenAI applications.
- Command of data collection and ingestion across web and mobile SDKs and backend integrations: data layers, identity methods, and offline data ingestion.
- Proven experience integrating, building and consuming both RESTful APIs and gRPC services.
- Hands-on experience with cloud hyperscalers such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- A proven track record of delivering high-quality software within a full Product Development Life Cycle (PDLC).
- A working knowledge of Linux/Unix environments.
Nice to Have
- Experience in education / Edtech
- Background as a PM who moved into engineering (or vice versa) or Technical Product Management / Solution Engineer or Sales Engineer
- Startup experience and comfort with ambiguity
Next Steps
Ready to apply? We’d love to hear from you. Please record a 2-minute video covering the following and send the link with your application.
- Would you rather go and speak with a customer directly by yourself, or work together with the sales and product team? Why?
- Talk about an entrepreneurial experience.
- What would make you quit?
This exercise is very important and is the first step in the evaluation process.
Our Hiring Philosophy
We know that the "perfect" candidate doesn't exist, and that skills can be learned. We're more interested in your passion for this work, your potential, and what you can add to our team. If you believe you have what it takes, but don't meet every single bullet point, please apply anyway!
About Lirvana Labs
Lirvana Labs builds AI-supported learning products and school data tools that connect student information to personalized instruction and educator decisions.
Unknown · 10–50 people
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