Principal Solutions Architect
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Role details
Tech stack
Job description
- Hold design authority over NX1 deployment patterns at the customer - attend and actively contribute to architecture review boards, security reviews, and data governance forums
- Design and defend the integration architecture across the customerâs data stack: identity federation, CDC patterns, governance metadata, data lineage, network segmentation, encryption
- Identify the next workloads NX1 is positioned to support before the customer has fully articulated them - and qualify those opportunities with stakeholder context and technical depth before handing them to the AE
- Produce high-quality design documents that hold up to hostile review boards without you in the room
- Serve as the technical escalation point when NX1 deployment issues arise at the customer
Engagement & Commercial Partnership (35%)
- Own the NX1 internal cadence on the account - keep engineering, FDEs, product, and the AE aligned on whatâs happening at the customer
- Maintain executive-level relationships with customer business and IT leadership at the appropriate cadence
- Translate architectural farming insights into AE-usable expansion theses: technical case, stakeholder map, rough scope, customer political context - qualified opportunities, not loose architectural musings
- Own escalation leadership when something breaks - youâre the person in the room
- Navigate vendor governance at a major bank: third-party risk reviews, audit responses, change management, vendor due diligence
Requirements
Required
- 12-18 years in enterprise data/cloud architecture as an SA, principal engineer, or equivalent
- At least one prior multi-year embedded engagement at a Tier 1 bank or equivalent regulated enterprise - you know what it means to be a vendor inside another organizationâs culture for 12+ months
- Hands-on or recent hands-on depth in the modern OSS data stack: Spark, Trino, Airflow, Iceberg, Kubernetes, S3-compatible object storage, Kafka - at petabyte scale, with hundreds of pipelines
- Experience producing and defending design documents in front of hostile architecture review boards
- Track record of identifying expansion or net-new use cases through architectural insight at a large customer - named examples of âI saw the customerâs next workload before they did, qualified it, and partnered with sales to expandâ
- Willingness to be on-site in Charlotte, NC (primary) and NYC (secondary) at 80%+ cadence
- Deep familiarity with bank IT culture and governance: risk and control frameworks, TPRM, change management, audit cycles, regulatory reporting patterns
Strong differentiators
- Prior embedded experience in a highly regulated industry, as a vendor SA
- Hands-on with relevant workloads: regulatory reporting pipelines, CCAR/DFAST data, AML/KYC, customer 360, treasury and liquidity
- Open-source contributions in NX1 stack components (Iceberg, Spark, Trino, Airflow)
- Conference presence at Subsurface, Trino Summit, or Airflow Summit in FS-adjacent tracks, * A collaborative team culture built on curiosity and respect
- Challenging work where your contributions clearly matter
- A leadership team that invests in learning and development
- The opportunity to work at the intersection of cloud, data, and AI innovation, If this role sounds like a great fit - or even close to one - weâd love to hear from you. We know that no candidate checks every single box, and weâre excited to meet people who bring curiosity, talent, and a desire to build meaningful work together.
Benefits & conditions
Be an Early Applicant Remote Hiring Remotely in United States Expert/Leader Remote Hiring Remotely in United States Expert/Leader Embed as the daily technical authority inside a Tier 1 regulated customer to design, defend, and operate NX1 integrations across the data stack. Lead architecture reviews, design integration patterns (identity, CDC, governance, lineage, encryption), surface and qualify new workload opportunities for sales, produce defendable design docs, coordinate internal stakeholders, maintain executive relationships, and lead escalations and vendor governance. The summary above was generated by AI About Nexus
About the company
You donât have an AI story if you donât have your data story. Thatâs where NexusOne comes in.
Weâre the converged data platform for the AI era - composable by design, built on an open-source foundation, and AI-native from the ground up. One identity, one governance envelope, one operational layer across every mainframe, data lake, warehouse, and streaming system in the business. For the first time, enterprises can bring their existing stack along instead of rebuilding it - and still give AI agents full context across the estate.
What we stand for is simple: sovereign data, interoperable systems, decoupled intelligence - delivered the way modern software should be. No rip-and-replace. No multi-year transformation. Our CEO Anu Jain puts it well: we turn the âball of yarnâ of data integrations into a unified engine - less like assembling car parts, more like buying the car ready to drive. 85+ open-source tools pre-integrated. AI-native automations that deploy and self-heal the stack without human toil. Forward-deployed engineers who build shoulder-to-shoulder with customer teams - hands on keyboards, not just on decks.
Itâs working, and fast. Weâre tripling revenue year over year, backed by Insight Partners, and running in production in environments most vendors wonât touch. Our platform processes credit risk data for 90%+ of US small businesses - 40M+ - every month. Intent signals for 300M+ subscribers monthly for Africaâs largest telco. The data and AI layer for a Top 3 US bank.
Weâre 100+ people across the US and India, headquartered in Atlanta. We think big, move fast, and donât mistake activity for progress. We hire people whoâd rather ship the rocket than brief someone on it.
Check out this podcast of Anu talking about our solution here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8g50sv5GhQ
This is not a typical solutions architect seat. You wonât be running pre-sales demos or responding to RFPs. Youâll be embedded full-time inside one of the largest financial institutions in the United States - living in their architecture review boards, holding design authority over how NX1 is deployed and integrated across their data infrastructure, and doing the technical farming that drives expansion: identifying the next workload class the customerâs architecture is ready for before they know it themselves.
The role is intentionally split: 65% solution architecture and use-case discovery, 35% engagement management. The 65% is the center of gravity. Credibility at this customer is earned through technical depth, not relationship tenure. Youâll be the daily technical presence at every architecture conversation, hold design authority over NX1 deployment patterns across the account, and own the integration design across the customerâs data and security infrastructure.
The 35% exists to prevent the role from drifting into pure delivery work. It covers internal coordination across NX1 functions, executive relationship maintenance at the customer, escalation leadership, and - critically - the clean handoff of expansion theses to the NX1 account executive on each account you cover. Expansion in these accounts originates with you; the AE closes it. The handoff has to be clean.
This is the inaugural deployment of this role at Nexus Cognitive. Youâll be shaping what âPrincipal SAâ means here, not inheriting a playbook someone else built.
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