Staff Solution Architect

Staff Solution Architect at Honeycomb

Honeycomb is at the forefront of defining observability, constantly raising expectations for developer tools. We collaborate with leading companies such as HelloFresh, Slack, LaunchDarkly, and Vanguard across various industries. This is a pivotal moment in our journey, having secured Series D funding, surpassed 200 employees, and earned a spot on Forbes’ America’s Best Startups list in both 2022 and 2023. For more insights into our recent achievements, please explore our blog posts and press releases on Honeycomb.io.

We are a talented, passionate, fiercely inclusive, and responsible group of individuals who come for the impact and stay for the culture. We hold strong convictions and strive to embody our values daily. Our goal is to empower our team to pursue their true passions alongside highly skilled yet humble peers.

As a fully distributed company, we believe that impact is paramount, regardless of your physical location. We are committed to investing in our people, ensuring a seamless orientation to our culture and processes, while simultaneously fostering a high degree of trust, autonomy, and accountability from day one.

Little More About The Team

The Solution Architecture team plays a crucial role at the intersection of technology, customer advocacy, and revenue, focusing on Honeycomb's most strategic opportunities. We partner with world-class engineering organizations to tackle complex observability challenges and revolutionize how teams build and operate software. This team comprises hands-on technical leaders dedicated to shaping major customer decisions, influencing go-to-market strategy, and redefining excellence in technical selling.

What You’ll Do In The Role

• Drive technical strategy for Honeycomb's largest, most intricate deals, collaborating with Strategic AEs and Sales Leadership across the region.
• Lead discovery sessions, solution design, and executive conversations, effectively linking Honeycomb's platform to critical engineering and business priorities.
• Own the technical victory, shaping success criteria, guiding Proofs of Concept (POCs), orchestrating competitive bake-offs, and building stakeholder conviction from initial contact to deal closure.
• Advise engineering leaders and executives at global enterprises on AI-era observability, modern operations, and best practices for building and running software.
• Transform complex customer environments into clear architectures and compelling solution narratives that resonate with both developers and decision-makers.
• Leverage AI tools for efficiency and creativity, ensuring accuracy and reliability with a human-in-the-loop approach.
• Engage hands-on when necessary: instrument applications, resolve technical issues, and help customers demonstrate outcomes in live environments.
• Develop scalable assets including technical content, reusable demos, and repeatable architectures, providing thought leadership that elevates the entire team.
• Deliver engaging demos, workshops, and presentations that inspire action, not just provide information.
• Collaborate across Sales, Product, Marketing, Field Engineering, and DevRel to refine go-to-market strategies and enhance our customer engagement.
• Channel field insights back into the company to help shape product direction and demo strategy.
• Mentor peers and exemplify the sound judgment and autonomy required for this role, outlining a clear path to broader leadership.

What You’ll Bring To The Role

• 7+ years of pre-sales, solution architecture, or customer-facing technical experience in B2B SaaS, preferably with strategic or enterprise accounts.
• A proven track record of successfully closing complex, high-value deals involving sophisticated buying committees and multiple technical stakeholders.
• Experience selling into developer, platform, SRE, or engineering-led organizations, quickly establishing credibility through both technical depth and business acumen.
• Strong executive presence and the ability to tailor your message effectively from hands-on practitioners to the C-suite.
• Exceptional solutioning skills: you can clearly whiteboard ideas, simplify complexity, and develop compelling technical strategies for ambiguous, high-stakes scenarios.
• Hands-on proficiency across modern cloud environments, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), containers, Kubernetes, distributed systems, and API-driven architectures.
• Solid working knowledge of observability, distributed tracing, and OpenTelemetry, understanding how modern teams instrument, troubleshoot, and optimize complex systems.
• Comfort navigating code and implementation specifics across various languages and frameworks, sufficient to guide instrumentation and validation directly.
• Strong instincts for unblocking deals, reframing challenges, and identifying practical solutions in ambiguous situations.
• Experience managing complex POCs and evaluations, including defining success criteria, mitigating risks, and achieving disciplined outcomes.
• A collaborative, cross-functional approach with demonstrated experience influencing Product, Engineering, and Go-to-Market teams.
• A well-informed perspective on the future of observability, developer tooling, and AI-assisted workflows, coupled with genuine enthusiasm for helping customers modernize.
• A mentorship and growth mindset: you are eager to share knowledge, build reusable assets, and foster the development of your colleagues.
• Familiarity with MEDDPICC or Command of the Message is a plus.
• Willingness to travel approximately 20% for customer engagements, field events, and internal collaboration.

What You'll Get When You Join The Hive

• A stake in our success – generous equity with an employee-friendly stock program.
• Transparent, experience-based pay, removing the need for negotiation.
• Unlimited PTO and paid sabbatical for recharging.
• A truly distributed-first mindset and culture.
• Stipends for home office, co-working, and internet.
• Comprehensive benefits coverage for employees, with additional options for dependents.
• Up to 16 weeks of paid parental leave, inclusive of all paths to parenthood.
• An annual development allowance.
• And much more...

Key skills/competency

• Solution Architecture
• Observability
• Distributed Tracing
• OpenTelemetry
• B2B SaaS Sales
• Cloud Environments
• Kubernetes
• Distributed Systems
• API-driven Architectures
• Executive Presence