What are the responsibilities and job description for the Solutions Architect position at protonai?
Solutions Architect Cambridge, MA | Hybrid (Mon, Wed, Thu in-office) Reports to: Head of Customer Experience
About Proton.ai
Proton.ai builds AI-native software for the distribution industry — an $8 trillion market that tech forgot. We're not bolting AI onto legacy software. It's in every product from day one.
We've built an AI-powered CRM that distributors actually use, and we're expanding fast. 120% NDR, 93% logo retention, $20M Series A from Felicis and Battery Ventures, and a 70-person team in Cambridge.
If you want to work on hard problems in a market where AI genuinely changes how businesses operate, this is it.
The Role
We're hiring a Solutions Architect to sit at the intersection of our technology and our customers' operations. This isn't a post-sale support role. It's a creative, strategic position where you figure out how Proton fits into the way a distribution business actually runs — and then make the case for it.
You'll work deals from the pre-sales stage through customer onboarding, designing workflows and technical solutions that connect Proton's platform to how our customers buy, sell, and service accounts. You'll spend a lot of time with prospects and customers: asking good questions, listening hard, and translating what you learn into solutions that stick.
If you don't get excited when a prospect walks you through a gnarly ERP integration or a weird edge case in their reorder workflow, this probably isn't the right fit. If you immediately start thinking about how to solve it — great, let's talk.
One more thing: we're serious about AI. Not as a buzzword, as a working tool. If you can't tell us specifically how you've used Claude (or another model) to do your job better, we'll have a hard time moving forward.
What You'll Do
- Partner with Sales to understand prospect needs and design solutions that map Proton's capabilities to their business workflows
- Build and present technical proposals, workflow diagrams, and architecture recommendations tailored to each customer's operations
- Lead discovery sessions with prospects and customers to surface integration requirements, data flows, and operational constraints
- Own solution design through the sales cycle, then hand off cleanly to Implementation with full context
- Collaborate with Product and Engineering to communicate patterns you're seeing in the field and influence the roadmap
- Serve as a trusted technical voice for customers post-launch when new use cases emerge
What We're Looking For
- 4 years in a Solutions Architect, Sales Engineer, or technical pre-sales role at a SaaS company
- Comfortable with API integrations, data modeling, and explaining technical concepts to non-technical buyers
- Experience working with ERP or distribution systems is a plus, but intellectual curiosity about operations matters more
- Strong communicator who can run a discovery call, build a compelling demo, and write a clear solution brief
- You've used AI tools — specifically Claude or comparable models — as a real part of your workflow. You have a specific, concrete answer when asked how.
- Low ego, high ownership. You'll be early in building this function and that means figuring things out as you go.
Compensation & Benefits
- Base salary: $160,000 – $200,000 equity
- Unlimited PTO 10 company holidays
- 401(k) with 3% employer contribution
- Medical, dental, and vision coverage
- 12 weeks paid parental leave
- Professional Growth Fund