Customer Solutions Architect

Prelude; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Prelude is seeking a Customer Solutions Architect to own Prelude’s technical customer journey from initial conversations through first successful study. You’ll work closely with Sales, Success, and Product to translate complex research workflows into scalable platform solutions.

You’ll lead technical demonstrations, build study prototypes, train customers, and enable teams to move opportunities to close while ensuring customers realize value quickly after deployment.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in an analytically rigorous field.
• 2-3 years of dedicated Customer Success Management experience, ideally at a SaaS company.
• Ability to translate technical concepts into plain language for non-technical stakeholders.
• Comfort operating in both commercial and technical conversations to support pre-sales, demos, and prototypes.
• Strong communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills.
• Problem-solving mindset with adaptability in a fast-paced environment.
• Ability to manage multiple accounts with minimal supervision.

Responsibilities

• Lead advanced product demonstrations and own the storyboard of the customer's end-to-end experience.
• Translate customer workflows into Prelude solutions.
• Build study prototypes that let prospects see their own research on the platform.
• Scope platform modules and implementation approaches.
• Lead implementation discovery and validate plans before build starts.
• Deliver tailored onboarding and training sized to each customer’s study.
• Coach study builders to catch issues early and reduce risk.
• Develop scalable enablement processes to avoid heroics.
• Train internal teams and feed customer insights back to Product/Marketing.
• Serve as the technical authority behind security and RFP questionnaires.

Skills

Protocol design

EDC architecture

Study workflows

Sales support (pre-sales)

Training & coaching

Communication skills

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

The Customer Solutions Architect owns Prelude’s technical customer journey — from first solution conversation to first successful study.

The Mission

Before a customer buys Prelude, you help them understand exactly how the platform will solve their research challenges. After they buy Prelude, you work with the Prelude Customer Success team to help the customer realize that value as quickly as possible.

You are equally comfortable discussing enterprise study architecture with a Head of Clinical Development, building a complex study prototype, training study builders, and helping an Account Executive scope the right solution. You are the deepest product expert outside of Product, and you own the technical narrative before the sale and the technical realization after it.

Your success is measured by two outcomes:

• Time to close — you remove technical uncertainty so complex deals move faster.
• Time to value — you get new customers to their first successful study sooner.

About Prelude

Prelude is the regulated evidence platform built exclusively for animal health and nutrition—connecting discovery, clinical development, field studies, and post-market evidence into one continuous, audit-ready system.

We are the leader in animal health clinical trial R&D software, serving many of the world’s leading animal health and nutrition companies with a platform purpose-built for regulated research. With more than two decades of domain expertise and over 1,000 studies supported, Prelude is helping modernize how animal health companies generate evidence from development through post-market research.

What You'll Own

The role follows the customer through four phases of their journey with Prelude.

Phase 1 — Technical Sales & Solution Design

Partner with Account Executives to win complex opportunities by removing technical uncertainty and bridging the gap between the sale and implementation.

• Lead advanced product demonstrations and own the storyboard of the customer's end-to-end experience.
• Help prospects envision how Prelude fits into their organization — and hold AEs accountable for the discovery that makes each demo land.
• Translate customer workflows into Prelude solutions.
• Build study prototypes that let prospects see their own research on the platform.
• Answer detailed technical and study-design questions with authority.
• Scope platform modules and implementation approaches.
• Lead implementation discovery, understanding study objectives and operational workflows.
• Recommend study architecture and platform configuration.
• Validate implementation plans before full build begins.

Phase 2 — Customer Enablement

Help customers become successful, independent users of Prelude.

• Deliver tailored onboarding and training — sized to each customer’s study, therapeutic area, and team, and adapted in real time to the person in the room.
• Coach study builders proactively, checking build status early and often to catch issues before they become risks.
• Improve study quality by forming an opinion on whether each build is well set up for that type of research — and how it could be better.
• Identify adoption risks and where our CS team can bridge capability gaps.
• Accelerate first study launch.
• Develop scalable, repeatable enablement processes so this doesn’t depend on heroics.

Phase 3 — Scale the Organization

Multiply your impact beyond individual customers.

• Improve demo environments and reusable implementation assets.
• Produce customer education content, including short, engaging product videos for lead generation and training.
• Train internal teams — pass product depth to Account Executives and Marketing, and explain why it matters.
• Feed customer insights back to Product and Marketing, and keep Sales informed on how, and by whom, Prelude is actually being used.
• Serve as the technical authority behind security and RFP questionnaires, and partner with Account Executives to guide quotes and agreements toward the right platform scope.

Who We're Looking For

We are looking for someone who naturally becomes the technical expert in every room they enter. Someone who enjoys going deep on complex systems, can quickly earn the trust of sophisticated customers, and finds satisfaction in simplifying complicated workflows. You thrive moving between commercial conversations, solution design, hands‑on configuration, and customer coaching. You’re equally energized by winning new business and ensuring customers achieve success after the sale.

You likely bring:

• Fluency in protocol design, EDC architecture, conditional logic, and study workflows — or the aptitude to get there fast.
• Experience supporting enterprise sales and scoping enterprise implementations.
• A track record of training sophisticated customers and building prototypes yourself, not just talking about the product.
• A commercial instinct for what each client cares about, and the discipline to build repeatable systems around it.

Requirements

Required

• Bachelor's degree in an analytically rigorous field (e.g., math, statistics, engineering, etc.)
• 2-3 years of dedicated Customer Success Management experience, ideally at a SaaS company
• Demonstrated ability to translate technical concepts (data workflows, system configuration, APIs, integrations) into plain language for non-technical stakeholders
• Comfort operating in both commercial and technical conversations — able to support Sales on pre-sales scoping, demos, and prototypes, and support Customer Success on adoption, retention, and expansion
• Strong communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills
• Problem-solving mindset with the adaptability to work in a fast-paced, evolving environment
• Ability to manage multiple accounts/projects with minimal supervision

Preferred

• Experience working in a laboratory or clinical trial environment, particularly within a regulated or research-driven setting
• Experience building in or configuring an Electronic Data Capture (EDC) system or similar clinical data platform
• Familiarity with the life sciences / clinical trials industry more broadly

How We'll Evaluate Candidates

Because building and training are core to this role, our interview process includes a short training component. Candidates will be trained on a piece of the product, then asked to build something based on that training and demo it back to us — a direct read on how quickly you learn, how well you teach, and how convincingly you can sell what you’ve built.