Manager, Solutions Architect

The Consensus; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance

Flexible PTO policy

Paid parental leave

Company-facilitated 401(k)

Job summary

The Consensus in New York is seeking a Manager for its Solution Architect team. In this role, you will lead and mentor a team as they work closely with sales and customers. You will guide your team through discovery calls and technical scoping, ensuring high performance of AI applications on our platform.

The ideal candidate has over 4 years of experience in Solution Architecture, combines technical depth with customer engagement skills, and excels in managing high-stakes projects.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of experience in a Solution Architecture role, including mentoring.
• Strong customer-facing skills, capable of clarifying ambiguous requirements.
• AI/ML knowledge to engage with technical stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of Solution Architects focusing on AI application deployment.
• Ensure timely delivery across multiple customer projects.
• Collaborate with leadership to align priorities with customer goals.

Skills

AI/ML background

Customer-facing communication skills

Technical depth

Ability to script and prototype

Education

4+ years of professional Solution Architecture experience

Job description

ABOUT BASETEN

Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products.

THE ROLE

As Manager (Player & Coach) of the Solution Architect team, you will lead and mentor a team of Solution Architects who will partner closely with Sales and customers to translate business needs into technical solutions, run technical discovery, and guide repeatable deployments and proofs of value for customers. Applying both hands-on technical ownership and managerial leadership, you will guide your team through the processes of owning discovery calls, demos, technical scoping and driving POC’s through to execution as well as designing, deploying, and managing high performance, low latency AI applications on Baseten’s platform.

You will also partner with product, infrastructure, and other customer engineering teams to ensure that large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI systems deliver best-in-class performance, reliability, and cost efficiency in production environments.

EXAMPLE INITIATIVES

• Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI
• The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription
• Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images
• Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs

RESPONSIBILITIES

Leadership

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of Solution Architects, providing guidance on technical direction, project execution, and professional development.
• Set clear goals and ensure timely, high-quality delivery across multiple customer-facing projects involving LLM deployment and inference optimization.
• Collaborate with leadership to align team priorities with company and customer goals, balancing short-term delivery, widely varying customer priorities, and long-term technical initiatives.
• Player-coach – While much of this role will be leading the team, you will also be expected to be a key driver on strategic product initiatives and customer engagements. The best managers derive credibility from being able to be hands-on when needed.

Team Management – Lead a team of Solution Architects who will:

• Partner with sales on customer discovery calls (most often second calls, occasionally first calls for large accounts).
• Lead demos and technical scoping to align on success criteria, architecture, and deployment approach.
• Own benchmarking and repeatable deployments, including handling standard deployment patterns and configurations across many modalities – LLMs, embeddings, image and video generation, VoiceAI, etc.
• Advising on tradeoffs like H100s vs B200s and latency-optimized vs throughput-optimized setups.
• Driving consistent “playbook” style deployments for common models and use cases.
• Become a power user of different runtimes such as vllm, sglang, and TRT-LMM and all the common configurations and tradeoffs between them
• Drive POC and project execution, including:
  • Scoping POCs and keeping stakeholders aligned on timeline, deliverables, and next steps.
  • Acting as the “ringleader” or project manager for POCs.
  • Pulling in Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) support when deeper or more complex technical work is needed.

REQUIREMENTS

• AI/ML background and the ability to credibly discuss AI/ML topics with technical stakeholders.
• 4+ years of professional Solution Architecture/Solutions Engineering experience, including 1+ year in a leadership or mentorship capacity.
• Strong customer-facing communication skills, including the ability to run structured discovery and clarify ambiguous requirements.
• Technical depth to scope solutions, without needing to write production code.
• Ability to script and prototype as needed, including comfort “vibe coding” to move quickly in technical workflows.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience running or supporting benchmarks for ML inference deployments.
• Familiarity with infrastructure tradeoffs relevant to inference performance and cost (for example GPU selection and latency versus throughput tuning).
• Experience serving as a cross-functional technical lead for customer POCs, including coordination across Sales and Engineering.
• Professional Software engineering experience

BENEFITS

• Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity.
• 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents
• Flexible PTO policy including company wide Winter Break (our offices are closed from Christmas Eve to New Year's Day!)
• Paid parental leave
• Fertility and family-building stipend through Carrot
• Company-facilitated 401(k)
• Exposure to a variety of ML startups, offering unparalleled learning and networking opportunities.

At Baseten, we are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace. We provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.

We are an Equal Opportunity Employer and will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with applicable law (by example, the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, where applicable).