Head of Solutions Architecture - US, East Coast

About the role

The Head of Solutions Architecture, US East, at Upwind is responsible for driving a team of expert Solutions Architects who partner with account executives to help companies understand and deploy Upwind's products. This includes hiring, managing, and guiding a team, as well as setting goals, enabling team success, and representing Upwind at strategic customer engagements.

Responsibilities

• Hire, manage, and guide a team of Solutions Architects by providing both technical leadership and career development support.
• Be deeply involved in customer-facing engagements, serving as an escalation point for the SA team and helping drive complex problem-solving initiatives for strategic customers.
• Enable the SA organization’s success by building scalable strategies, improving processes, identifying operational gaps, and addressing challenges at the root-cause level.
• Set goals for your team in collaboration with Sales and other cross-functional stakeholders to establish clear expectations, accountability, and measurable performance outcomes.
• Act as a technical sponsor for high-value strategic customers and advise them on their overall security adoption strategies, use case scoping, and POC execution.
• Partner closely with Industries sales leadership to identify new strategies to drive adoption of Upwind products across specific verticals and horizontal use cases.
• Work cross-functionally with Product, Engineering, and Marketing teams to influence roadmap priorities, amplify customer feedback, remove blockers to adoption, and improve go-to-market effectiveness.
• Coach and mentor the SA team on customer engagement, technical strategy, and execution excellence while helping guide the overall direction and maturity of the organization.
• Travel to customer sites or conferences for executive-level sessions, technical workshops, and relationship building.
• Establish a shared vision for creating solutions that enable beneficial and safe AI in technology products.
• Contribute to thought leadership through conference presentations, webinars, and technical content creation.
• Stay current with emerging AI trends and the competitive landscape.

Requirements

• 5+ years of experience as a Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, or similar pre-sales technical role.
• 3+ years of technical pre-sales management experience.
• Deep technical proficiency with cloud security industry.
• Ability to build and rapidly scale teams and processes within ambiguous and fast-moving environments.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and coaching abilities.
• Strong executive presence and ability to foster deep relationships with technical leaders and engineering teams at Fortune 500 companies.
• A passion for making powerful technology safe and societally beneficial.
• Active interest in emerging research and industry trends within cloud security.