Principal Business Solutions Architect

Inriver • Chicago, IL

4d • $145,000 - $190,000 • Remote

About The Position

At Inriver, we help brands deliver better product experiences — wherever their customers are. From the first product detail to the final purchase decision, we make product information work smarter. We are now looking for a Principal Business Solutions Architect to join our team in the United States. 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 BSA 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. If you're a Senior, Lead, or Principal Solutions Architect, a Senior, or Principal Consultant, or a practice lead at a mid-sized SaaS company or a boutique commerce consultancy, a lot of this will look familiar — just with the pieces spread across different people. Someone else scopes the deal. Someone else owns the client after go-live. Someone else decides how the team works. This role puts those pieces back in one pair of hands. You're in the room before the deal closes; you're still the client's architect a year later, and you have a real say in how Client Solutions runs. You also don't need 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. We'd much rather meet someone who has genuinely owned a messy enterprise data program than someone who already knows our vocabulary. We're a few hundred people, not a few thousand. Seniority here comes with the work rather than with layers underneath you — there's no architecture review board standing between you and a design decision, no separate pre-sales function to hand the hard client conversation to, and no delivery organization big enough for anyone to be insulated from how an implementation actually goes. For a lot of your future colleagues, that's the best part of the job. It's worth knowing which kind of person you are before you apply.

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.

Nice To Haves

• A degree is a plus, not a filter.

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