Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture - Growth

Summary:

The Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture leads a team of Scale and Enterprise Solutions Architects within Temporal’s Growth organization. This leader is responsible for building, coaching, and scaling a high-performing pre-sales technical team that helps prospects and customers evaluate the suitability of their applications for Temporal’s platform, understand the technical advantages of our cloud service, and expand adoption in production environments. Temporal Cloud is what this team is selling, and the right leader will ensure every engagement clearly articulates its value.

The ideal candidate combines deep technical credibility with a proven track record of leading solutions-oriented teams in open-source or developer-infrastructure companies. They bring intellectual curiosity, process discipline, and a strategic mindset to sales engagements—knowing where to focus, how to prioritize, and when to go deep on technical discovery.

What You’ll Do:

Team Leadership & Development

• Recruit, hire, onboard, and develop a team of Solutions Architects supporting Scale and Enterprise accounts.
• Establish clear performance expectations, coaching rhythms, and career development paths for direct reports.
• Foster a culture of curiosity, technical excellence, and customer obsession across the team.
• Drive consistent execution through defined processes for technical discovery, proof-of-value engagements, and deal support.

Sales Strategy & Process

• Partner closely with Sales leadership and Account Executives to build and execute comprehensive account strategies.
• Ensure the team conducts thorough, high-quality technical discovery to identify the right use cases and champion the right solutions.
• Prioritize team resources against the highest-impact opportunities, balancing pipeline coverage with deal quality.
• Bring rigor and repeatability to the pre-sales process—from qualification through technical win—while adapting to each customer’s unique context.
• Serve as an escalation point and strategic advisor on complex, high-value engagements.

Technical Leadership

• Guide the team in positioning Temporal against competing technologies and architectural patterns with clarity and credibility.
• Ensure Solutions Architects can educate customers on both the technical benefits and the limitations of Temporal’s platform and cloud service.
• Maintain a hands-on understanding of Temporal’s product, staying close to product roadmap and engineering developments.
• Act as a voice of the customer back into Product, Engineering, and Marketing organizations.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with Customer Success, Professional Services, and Developer Relations to ensure seamless post-sale transitions and ongoing expansion.
• Partner with Marketing on field content, competitive positioning, and event strategy.
• Collaborate with Product to surface customer needs, feature requests, and market trends.

What You’ll Bring:

Experience

• 5+ years of experience in Solutions Architecture, Sales Engineering, or a comparable customer-facing technical role, with at least 2 years managing or leading a technical pre-sales team.
• Proven success in open-source, developer-tools, or infrastructure-software companies—you understand the unique dynamics of selling to and with developer communities.
• Strong technical background with hands-on experience in distributed systems, microservices, or event-driven architectures.
• Proficiency in one or more of Temporal’s supported languages: Java, Golang, TypeScript, Python, C#, or PHP.
• Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure) and familiarity with modern development and deployment tooling (CI/CD, containers, orchestration).

Skills and Competencies

• Process-Driven Operator: You bring structure and repeatability to technical sales without making it bureaucratic. You know how to build playbooks, track leading indicators, and coach your team through them.
• Exceptional Technical Discovery: You know how to uncover the real problems behind a customer’s ask, identify the right stakeholders, and map solutions to business outcomes.
• Strategic Prioritization: You have a sharp sense of where to invest the team’s time and energy—which deals to go deep on, which to qualify out, and how to balance long-term relationships with near-term pipeline.
• Curious & Adaptive: You’re naturally curious about technology and business alike. You learn quickly, stay current, and bring a growth mindset to everything you do.
• Communication Excellence: You can translate complex technical concepts for executive audiences and dive deep with engineering teams with equal ease.
• Coaching Mindset: You invest in the growth of your people—through structured feedback, deal reviews, and hands-on mentorship—because you know that’s how teams scale.

Compensation: