Principal, Solutions Architect

Evolent

2d • $130,000 - $150,000 • Remote

About The Position

Evolent partners with health plans and providers to achieve better outcomes for people with most complex and costly health conditions. Working across specialties and primary care, we seek to connect the pieces of fragmented health care system and ensure people get the same level of care and compassion we would want for our loved ones. Evolent employees enjoy work/life balance, the flexibility to suit their work to their lives, and autonomy they need to get things done. We believe that people do their best work when they're supported to live their best lives, and when they feel welcome to bring their whole selves to work. That's one reason why diversity and inclusion are core to our business. Join Evolent for the mission. Stay for the culture.

What You’ll Be Doing:
Principal Product Solutions Architect, Specialty Product Management

Role Overview
The Principal Product Solutions Architect is a Director-level individual contributor responsible for bringing senior product judgment into customer solutioning before commitments are made. This role ensures Evolent’s specialty solutions are product-coherent, commercially sound, and operationally sustainable from early customer engagement through delivery transition. This role exists to solve a critical business problem: preventing non-standard customer commitments, custom solutioning, and under-scoped deal structures from creating downstream burden on Product, Engineering, Operations, and Delivery. Operating at the intersection of Product, Strategic Accounts, Sales, and Delivery, this leader ensures solution decisions are anchored in product strategy, platform intent, workflow standards, and economic reality, not just short-term deal momentum. While this role will be customer-facing and deeply engaged in commercial discussions, it is not a sales engineering role and not a custom solution design role. It is a product-led governance role with explicit accountability to:

protect product and platform integrity
distinguish standard capability from true customization
make tradeoffs visible before commitments are made
surface delivery, pricing, and roadmap implications early
reduce downstream rework, escalation, and avoidable complexity
The Principal Product Solutions Architect is accountable for improving the quality of solution decisions upstream, especially in complex, high-stakes, or strategically ambiguous opportunities.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Engineering, Computer Science, Healthcare Administration, or a related field; advanced degree preferred
• 10+ years of experience in Product Management, Solution Architecture, Product Strategy, Implementation Strategy, or related roles in a complex technology environment
• Significant experience operating in pre-sales, commercial shaping, or strategic discovery contexts while representing product and platform interests
• Deep understanding of how customer commitments translate into product, engineering, implementation, and support burden
• Proven ability to evaluate solution tradeoffs through a product, operational, technical, and commercial lens
• Strong executive presence and the ability to influence senior leaders across Product, Sales, Strategic Accounts, Delivery, and Engineering
• Demonstrated ability to challenge proposed approaches constructively and drive clarity in ambiguous, high-stakes situations
• Experience building reusable workflow models, solution standards, and decision frameworks
• High speed internet over 10 Mbps and, specifically for all call center employees, the ability to plug in directly to the home internet router.

Nice To Haves

• Strong understanding of healthcare technology, workflow complexity, and regulated operating environments preferred
• Experience in specialty benefits management, utilization management, clinical workflows, or payer/provider technology strongly preferred

Responsibilities

• Serve as the senior product authority in pre-commitment solution shaping, ensuring proposed customer solutions align to product strategy and roadmap direction, reflect standardized, productized workflows wherever possible, stay within supported product and configuration boundaries, and make tradeoffs explicit across customer value, product integrity, delivery feasibility, and long-term scalability.
• Apply strong product judgment to distinguish clearly between core product capabilities, supported configuration patterns, custom requests that create new product, engineering, or operational burden, and exceptions that may be justified strategically but require explicit decision-making and cost visibility.
• Drive higher decision quality in commercial and early discovery contexts, even when not the final decision-maker. This role is measured by the soundness of upstream solution decisions and the reduction of downstream complexity, not by volume of deals supported.
• Partner with Strategic Accounts, Sales, and Product leaders to ensure customer commitments are grounded in a realistic understanding of what the product does today, what can be configured within standard patterns, what requires non-standard customization, and what creates incremental implementation, engineering, support, or roadmap burden.
• Make the commercial implications of solution choices visible early, including custom work that should be reflected in deal structure or pricing, customer-specific asks that do not create reusable value for the broader portfolio, commitments that imply roadmap changes, technical debt, or operational lift, and strategic exceptions that require deliberate executive review.
• Actively challenge, redirect, or escalate solution proposals that create material risk to platform health, delivery success, pricing integrity, or future roadmap flexibility. Help ensure that Evolent does not absorb hidden product and engineering cost through poorly structured or under-scoped commercial commitments.
• Own the coherent representation of Evolent’s specialty product ecosystem across specialty products, ensuring solutions are positioned as an integrated portfolio rather than a collection of one-off offers.
• Maintain and evolve canonical end-to-end workflow models spanning intake, clinical review, decisioning, correspondence, and downstream operational execution.
• Ensure workflows presented internally and externally are operationally accurate, consistent where product intent is shared, explicit where variation is intentional and justified, and usable as a basis for solutioning, scoping, and implementation planning.
• Surface second-order and downstream impacts of solution decisions across delivery, operations, support, and future product flexibility.
• Engage early in customer discovery and solution shaping to ensure opportunities align to product intent, known workflow standards, feasible delivery models, and realistic configuration and implementation boundaries.
• Provide continuity from pre-sales through transition by documenting and communicating original product assumptions, agreed scope boundaries, known risks and tradeoffs, and any strategic exceptions or non-standard commitments.
• Serve as a key bridge between Product, Sales, Strategic Accounts, and Delivery to reduce downstream rework, scope confusion, and execution escalations.
• Establish and apply clear decision frameworks for when customer-specific solutioning should be absorbed into standard product patterns, delivered through supported configuration, priced and scoped as custom work, or declined or escalated as misaligned to strategy.
• Partner with Product and Commercial leadership to ensure exceptions are evaluated not only on revenue opportunity, but also on reuse potential across customers, delivery complexity, engineering burden, support burden, time-to-value, and impact on product roadmap and platform sustainability.
• Help create greater organizational clarity on where Evolent should flex for strategic advantage and where it should hold the line.
• Raise solution quality and product maturity across the organization by modeling strong product judgment and tradeoff thinking, creating reusable solution patterns and decision frameworks, improving clarity on product boundaries, configuration standards, and workflow intent, and informally mentoring Product Managers and commercial partners on product-led solutioning.
• Support the evolution of a more disciplined, product-led commercial model where customer solutioning strengthens the portfolio rather than fragmenting it.

Benefits

• work/life balance
• flexibility to suit their work to their lives
• autonomy they need to get things done
• comprehensive benefits (including health insurance benefits) to qualifying employees

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director