Startup Solutions Architect, San Francisco Early Stage Startups

Amazon • San Francisco, CA

3d

About The Position

Are you passionate about startups? Do you get excited about helping founders
solve hard technical problems at the earliest and most critical stages of
building their company? We're looking for a Solutions Architect who wants to be
deeply embedded in San Francisco's startup ecosystem. Come join us!

Early-stage startups are unlike any other customer. Founders are moving fast,
resources are tight, and the technical decisions they make today can either
unlock their growth or become a bottleneck six months from now. Many of these
companies are coming straight out of top accelerators like Y Combinator or are
freshly backed by leading VC firms, and they need a trusted technical advisor in
their corner. This is where you come in.

In this role, you'll work directly with early-stage founders across a wide range
of industries including AI/ML, FinTech, ClimateTech, healthcare, consumer, B2B
SaaS, and more. You'll help them make smart, pragmatic architectural decisions
that set them up to move fast without breaking things later. You'll have the
chance to build real, lasting relationships with these founders and establish
yourself as one of the first trusted technical voices in their journey.

You won't be handing founders a generic playbook. On any given week you might be
helping a first-time founder think through their architecture before they've
written a single line of code, helping a seed-stage company figure out how to
scale after an unexpected viral launch, or working through a compliance
challenge with a FinTech startup that needs to move quickly but can't afford to
cut corners.

Beyond your direct work with founders, you'll also get time to stay sharp and
keep your technical skills fresh. You'll act as a voice for the startups you
work with, making sure the right products and features are being built for their
needs. And you'll have plenty of opportunities to share your knowledge more
broadly by writing technical content and presenting at startup and developer
events across San Francisco's ecosystem.

Requirements

• 2+ years of design, implementation, or consulting in applications and infrastructures experience
• 4+ years of specific technology domain areas (e.g. software development, cloud computing, systems engineering, infrastructure, security, networking, data & analytics) experience

Nice To Haves

• Experience working within software development or Internet-related industries
• Experience migrating or transforming legacy customer solutions to the cloud
• Experience working with AWS technologies from a dev/ops perspective
• Experience working with end user or developer communities

Responsibilities

• Work hands-on with early-stage founders to design and iterate on architectures that are practical for where they are today but built to scale as they grow
• Help startups navigate the fast-moving GenAI landscape, from selecting the right foundation models and AI services to building production-ready AI-powered products and services
• Guide founders through the real challenges of building GenAI applications, including managing model costs, latency, accuracy, safety, and AI best practices
• Support startups in building the right data foundations to power their AI products, whether that's vector databases, data pipelines, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or fine-tuning workflows
• Build and deepen relationships within San Francisco's startup ecosystem, including top accelerators like Y Combinator, incubators, and leading VC firms
• Be a voice for your founders, connecting their feedback and needs directly to product and engineering teams to help shape the tools and services being built for them
• Create technical content tailored to early-stage startups, such as blog posts, reference architectures, and sample code, that helps founders move faster and spend less time reinventing the wheel
• Share your expertise at startup events, demo days, and developer meetups across the San Francisco ecosystem to build trust and visibility in the community

Benefits

• Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs)
• health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage)
• 401(k) matching
• paid time off
• parental leave

What This Job Offers

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