Solutions Architect, SMB (Presales)

At Stripe, you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach. 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. 

The Solutions Architecture Team partners with our users to realize their full potential through the adoption of prescriptive solutions that drive their growth and success.

We work with C-level executives, finance leaders, product design and engineering teams at large global brands and platforms who are building financial services solutions with Stripe.  We work closely with Account Executives, Professional Services, Customer Success Managers, Partners, Technical Account Managers and Product Teams to develop and execute on the account strategy for Stripe’s platform prospects. 

As a member of the team, Solutions Architects/Presales Engineer 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. We architect business models with them so they can drive new monetization opportunities and growth.

• Be a key member of the Platform account team with deep involvement in defining the customer strategy; Identify and close new complex opportunities, and accelerate solution adoption. 
• Drive thought leadership and be a trusted advisor for key business and technical stakeholders including CIO, CTO, COO, CRO, CDO, Head of Product Engineering, and Head of Payments.
• Work to deeply understand the customer’s business objectives, and then design and apply Stripe’s solutions to their challenges. Develop and articulate the end to end customer transformation journey and create future roadmaps and architectures with deep 3rd party integrations in play.
• Conduct business analysis and background research on customers, industries, and competitors.
• Lead strategy engagements with users to align to business priorities, design solutions and secure the technical win by performing in-depth customer discovery, evangelizing the proposed solutions through executive briefings, readouts, presentations and solution demos. 
• Expand Stripe’s footprint within existing accounts to new global markets and business units by introducing new capabilities and local payment methods.
• Act as the “Voice of the Customer” to bring insights, trends and opportunities to the leadership, product and engineering teams from the forefront and prioritized for delivery.  
• Participate in sales forecasting, Quarterly Business Reviews and account/territory planning to strategically and tactically align for success.
• Act as a crucial part of the sales team, providing technical insight and solutions to prospective and existing platform users. Guide and provide technical expertise on Stripe and its benefits for both platforms and their customers.
• Showcase the capability of Stripe's platform in solving business problems, highlighting features, benefits, and potential customizations. This includes demonstrating how those benefits pass down to the customer's own user-base.
• Manage pre-sales projects, coordinating proof of concept development, and feasibility checks. Ensure all solutions proposed are viable, beneficial to our potential clients, and also accommodating to their customers.

We’re looking for someone who meets the minimum requirements to be considered for the role. If you meet these requirements, you are encouraged to apply. The preferred qualifications are a bonus, not a requirement.

• 4+ years of experience in a similar customer-facing engineering role such as solution consultant, solutions architect, or sales engineer, for a global software enterprise.
• Executive engagement skills and presence, with an ability to establish strong relationships with key decision makers and build credibility at all levels.
• Effective group-facilitation skills and confidence in proposing and leading customer meetings to gain strategic footing and pursue opportunities.
• Thorough understanding of the software development lifecycle and API architecture.
• Outstanding spoken and written communication skills, presentation skills, and confidence in explaining complex concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Develop a comprehensive understanding of Connect, Stripe's solution for enabling platform payments, exploring its various features, and integration methodologies.
• Gather an in-depth understanding of Stripe's Payments and Billing systems and their applicability across diverse business models to beneficially cater to individual clients' and their customers' needs.
• Ability to understand how a wide variety of applications such as ERP, CRM, Billing, Tax and legacy systems interact with each other in a platform technology stack/ecosystem. 
• Strong organizational and time management skills and the ability to juggle competing priorities while working with multiple strategic opportunities and customers.

• Experience as a customer facing, domain expert in the payments space, presenting, and architecting solutions for platform customers.
• Prior experience driving technical sales with top-tier enterprise scale platforms and supporting them and their customer’s unique requirements 
• Experience with integrating Stripe or other RESTful APIs into web applications.
• Experience in systems design, building and deploying complex applications.
• Experience in helping customers adopt and consume software in a cloud model.
• Passionate about learning and actively seeks out knowledge
• Ability to work independently and confidently to develop a path forward with customers under ambiguous circumstances.
• Strategic and creative thinker who can proactively identify challenges and maintain a positive approach when facing difficult obstacles.
• Strong collaboration skills to work seamlessly with extended teams to support our users.