Principal Business Solutions Architect

Inriver • Chicago, IL

20d • $145,000 - $190,000 • Remote

About The Position

This role exists at the intersection of commercial ambition and technical reality. You'll be the person who walks into a client's world, diagnoses what's actually broken in their product data operation — surfacing what they actually need, not just what they say they want — and designs the solution that fixes it. You'll then hand that solution to an Implementation Consultant (IC), the colleague who builds it, and stay accountable for what gets built: not as a passenger, but as the person the IC calls when a build decision turns out to be a scope decision. You understand the e-commerce stack well enough to have a point of view in a discovery session, not just a working knowledge of it. But the stack is only half of it — you also need to understand the world the people around it live in: the marketing team under a rebrand deadline, the data management team fighting the same duplicate-SKU problem for the third year running, the regulatory affairs team who can't ship a product update without sign-off, the logistics team who'll feel every bad data model at the pallet level. You can read a room, make a business case, and guide a build. In this team, the PBSA is the role that connects the deal to the delivery. This role is being built now, not inherited — you'd shape what BSA development, delivery experimentation and client-facing strategic representation look like as Inriver's pod model scales through 2026 and 2027, working directly with the Director of Client Solutions rather than executing an established playbook.

Requirements

• Commercial acumen and emotional intelligence. You can read a room, navigate a resistant stakeholder, and support a sales cycle as well as a delivery cycle.
• Solution architecture experience in SaaS. Ideally PIM, commerce, DAM or MDM — but felt commercial experience in a comparable data-heavy domain matters more than the specific label.
• Real technical proficiency. Sound understanding of development concepts, product data structure and schema, and API/integration patterns. Not required: fluency in four coding languages.
• Fluency in the e-commerce tech stack, and the ability to credibly speak the language of the teams that live around the data — marketing, data/MDM, regulatory affairs, logistics.
• Enterprise consultancy capability alongside a willingness to be hands-on in the build. You've owned client discovery and solution design, not just executed against someone else's scope.
• A track record that shows career-building rather than short-tenure job-hopping.
• Around 8+ years of relevant experience.
• A degree is a plus, not a filter.

Nice To Haves

• PIM on your CV. A PIM platform is a data model, an integration surface, a governance challenge and a group of stakeholders who don't quite agree with each other — and if you've architected that shape of problem somewhere adjacent, you'll find your feet here quickly.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end PIM solution design on an enterprise scale — data models, business processes, integrations, and governance frameworks — translating what a client says they want into what they actually need.
• Hand implementation-ready, de-risked scope to the pod's Implementation Consultant(s), and remain their first point of technical escalation through delivery.
• Own the technical calls on build, design, and scope questions post-signing, making sure clear proposals and options reach the client whenever something falls outside agreed scope.
• Stay engaged as a trusted advisor after go-live — a meaningful share of your time goes here, and it's often where the next service-package or maintenance-attach opportunity gets spotted.
• Review existing implementations and turn findings into recommendations.
• Run workshops, discovery sessions, and stakeholder interviews across the full customer journey.
• Coach BSAs across the region on strategy and craft, using the same advisory skillset you use with clients.
• Design and lead structured experiments that improve team efficiency and customer outcomes, and codify what works into reusable playbooks.
• Represent Client Solutions on client SteerCos for medium-to-large engagements.
• Work directly with the Director of Client Solutions to shape the annual Client Solutions strategy.

Benefits

• medical
• dental
• vision
• 401K
• STD
• LTD

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed