Partner Solutions Architect

The Partner Solution Architect (Partner SA) position is a technical lead working with CircleCI’s strategic partners, customers, and across the CircleCI internal teams.  The new position is in the Business Development (BD) department, reporting to the Head of BD, and located in the San Francisco Bay Area.  The role is hybrid, with a general expectation of at least 2 days a week in office, and occasional travel to meet with partners or attend conferences/summits.

Overview:

The Partner SA is an authority on CI/CD practices, and has a deep understanding of DevOps.  In addition, the Partner SA is a trusted advisor, relationship builder, problem-solver, and idea-generator for Circleci partner relationships.  Examples of the partner relationships that the Partner SA will be deeply involved in include: 

• Channel sales meetings with AWS customer account teams
• Technical strategy, planning, and execution sessions with AWS product teams
• Collaborations with AWS technical teams (AWS SA’s, TAMs, ProServe, etc.) 
• Strategic discussions with DevOps-focused teams at Systems Integrators (SIs)

What we’re looking for:

• Eagerness to learn
• Outstanding interpersonal skills:
• Comfort presenting/leading discussions with technical/non-technical audiences.
• Ability to identify the customer’s technical challenges, and communicate the impact it will have on the customer’s business goals.
• Ability to align goals across diverse teams by communicating a collective vision.
• Be clear and concise.
• Technical knowledge:
• Experience building applications and deploying infrastructure using CI/CD pipelines to automate the build, test, deployment activities.
• Solid understanding of common software delivery methodologies like agile, CI/CD, and DevOps with the ability to prescribe the right practices, tools, and technologies for each prospect’s needs.
• Strong ops/infrastructure knowledge (IaaS, Containers, Networking), and experience working with security teams.
• Entrepreneurial streak:
• You will have a strong desire to work on cutting edge product and go-to-market ideas with strategic partners to find large, new growth opportunities for CircleCI.  
• You will need to understand that finding these opportunities:
• Is risky, involves accepting ambiguity, and can be take time to implement
• Can be interesting, challenging, and frustrating at the same time
• Requires cross-functional planning of initiatives with continuous refinement, pivots, and sometimes failure.

Technologies we look for:

• Skills that they already know include working with DevOps, CI/CD
• Other things that would ramp up quickly
• Well-versed in the AWS ecosystem
• AWS Cloud Practitioner

Main Job Responsibilities:

Channel Sales

• Work closely with the CircleCI Channel Sales Leads to support their meetings with AWS account teams and their customers.  
• The Partner SA will help lead discussions around the customer’s DevOps and CI/CD pain points, and how CircleCI-AWS collaborate to solve customer’s needs.
• Partner SA steps include:
• Uncover customer’s DevOps needs, often across multiple software teams
• Identify and develop a roadmap for success including migration and onboarding activities aligned to business goals.
• Advocate the benefits of the CircleCI platform to highly technical audiences, crafting the right technical proofs and examples.
• Guide the technical implementation and day-to-day management of CircleCI Trials and Proof-of-Concepts, integrating each customer’s chosen technology stack - ensuring early success and a long-term business relationship.
• Partner closely with our customer success teams to craft an outstanding customer experience - for life.
• Goal will be to solve customer pain points, close customer deals, and build case studies across industry verticals that will catalyze further growth.

Working with the AWS Technical Field Community (TFC)

• The Partner SA will be the technical point person working with the AWS TFCs (SAs, TAMs, ProServe teams) 
• Among the key roles include:
• Create training courses, presentations, and enablement for AWS TFCs
• Co-author blogs, jointly create webinars, co-present to AWS teams
• Manage the TFCs collaboration with the CircleCI Product team
• Plan and execute joint efforts with TFCs on technical events, such as AWS Summits, Webinars, CircleCI events, etc.
• Build relationships with the AWS TFCs

 Integrations with AWS and ISV services

• Manage and optimize the integration of 3rd party ISVs with the goal of reducing the total integration steps and amount of time required by the customer.
• Build Orbs, APIs, and Webhooks to streamline the integration process.

SI Partnerships

• Play a central role in recruiting, enabling, and co-selling with the SI’s.
• In addition, to win the support of SI’s, the Partner SA will lead discussions with internal DevOps teams at SI’s to encourage trial/adoption of CircleCI.

Collaborate with AWS Product Teams

• Ensure planning, coordination, and execution on product-related initiatives

AWS Relationship

• Co-manage relationships with the AWS team that works with CircleCI
• Attend AWS Summits and enablement sessions with TFCs, SIs, and AWS teams

Tech Partnerships

• Work on other strategic initiatives across AI/ML, data, security, ISV platforms, etc.