Principal Solutions Architect

Nexus Cognitive Technologies • Atlanta, GA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

NexusOne is seeking a Principal Solutions Architect to be embedded full-time within one of the largest financial institutions in the United States. This role is distinct from typical pre-sales solutions architect positions. The primary focus will be on living within the customer's architecture review boards, holding design authority over the deployment and integration of NX1 across their data infrastructure, and driving expansion through technical farming. The role is split between 65% solution architecture and use-case discovery, and 35% engagement management. Credibility will be earned through technical depth, with the individual serving as the daily technical presence in architecture conversations and owning integration design across the customer's data and security infrastructure. The engagement management portion ensures internal coordination, executive relationship maintenance, escalation leadership, and clean handoffs of expansion theses to the account executive. This is an inaugural role, offering the opportunity to shape the definition of "Principal SA" at Nexus Cognitive.

Requirements

• 12–18 years in enterprise data/cloud architecture as an SA, principal engineer, or equivalent
• At least one prior multi-year embedded engagement at a Tier 1 bank or equivalent regulated enterprise — you know what it means to be a vendor inside another organization's culture for 12+ months
• Hands-on or recent hands-on depth in the modern OSS data stack: Spark, Trino, Airflow, Iceberg, Kubernetes, S3-compatible object storage, Kafka — at petabyte scale, with hundreds of pipelines
• Experience producing and defending design documents in front of hostile architecture review boards
• Track record of identifying expansion or net-new use cases through architectural insight at a large customer — named examples of "I saw the customer's next workload before they did, qualified it, and partnered with sales to expand"
• Willingness to be on-site at the customer in Charlotte, NC (primary) and NYC (secondary) at 80%+ cadence
• Deep familiarity with bank IT culture and governance: risk and control frameworks, TPRM, change management, audit cycles, regulatory reporting patterns

Nice To Haves

• Prior embedded experience at Wells Fargo specifically, as a vendor SA
• Hands-on with the WF-relevant workloads: regulatory reporting pipelines, CCAR/DFAST data, AML/KYC, customer 360, treasury and liquidity
• Open-source contributions in NX1 stack components (Iceberg, Spark, Trino, Airflow)
• Conference presence at Subsurface, Trino Summit, or Airflow Summit in FS-adjacent tracks

Responsibilities

• Hold design authority over NX1 deployment patterns at the customer — attend and actively contribute to architecture review boards, security reviews, and data governance forums
• Design and defend the integration architecture across the customer's data stack: identity federation, CDC patterns, governance metadata, data lineage, network segmentation, encryption
• Identify the next workloads NX1 is positioned to support before the customer has fully articulated them — and qualify those opportunities with stakeholder context and technical depth before handing them to the AE
• Produce high-quality design documents that hold up to hostile review boards without you in the room
• Serve as the technical escalation point when NX1 deployment issues arise at the customer
• Own the NX1 internal cadence on the account — keep engineering, FDEs, product, and the AE aligned on what's happening at the customer
• Maintain executive-level relationships with customer business and IT leadership at the appropriate cadence
• Translate architectural farming insights into AE-usable expansion theses: technical case, stakeholder map, rough scope, customer political context — qualified opportunities, not loose architectural musings
• Own escalation leadership when something breaks — you're the person in the room
• Navigate vendor governance at a major bank: third-party risk reviews, audit responses, change management, vendor due diligence

Benefits

• A collaborative team culture built on curiosity and respect
• Challenging work where your contributions clearly matter
• A leadership team that invests in learning and development
• The opportunity to work at the intersection of cloud, data, and AI innovation

What This Job Offers

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