Private Draft

The 29 personas behind AI

We’ve organized every stage and persona in the AI supply chain, informed by real recruiting at frontier companies. Click any row to see matching profiles from our talent graph.

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Solutions Engineering

Wins deals with technical depth

Solutions Engineering

Summary

Known as: Solutions Architect, Enterprise Architect, Sales Engineer, Solutions Engineer, GTM Product Manager

Customer-facing technical builders who drive pre-sales technical win and pilot success. Translate requirements, design integration architecture, and plan deployments under security and compliance constraints. Turn what's learned from deals into repeatable packaging and clear feedback loops back into Product. In smaller orgs, this role blurs with forward-deployed work — especially late-stage deals where integration risk is the primary blocker.

Specializations

Technical Discovery & Deal Strategy — Requirements translation, technical qualification, competitive positioning, and the deal-stage work that determines whether a prospect's environment, data, and constraints are a fit. Runs bakeoffs, evaluation comparisons, and proof-of-concept scoping that convert technical uncertainty into pipeline velocity.

Integration Architecture & Pre-Sale Prototyping — Designs deployment architectures under real enterprise constraints: IAM, data residency, network topology, compliance. Builds pre-sale prototypes, demos, and reference implementations that prove feasibility and unblock procurement — not production implementations, but the artifacts that make a buyer confident enough to sign. The line between this and forward-deployed production work blurs on late-stage deals where integration risk is the primary blocker.

Enablement & Packaging — Extracts repeatable patterns from deals: reference architectures, integration playbooks, security questionnaire templates, and onboarding accelerators. Feeds field learnings back into Product and engineering as structured requirements. The compounding layer that makes each subsequent deployment faster.

Where the Work Lives

[1]Substrate

[2]Compute

[3]Intelligence

[4]Systems

Secondary

Designs integration architectures and deployment plans under security and compliance constraints.

[5]Distribution

Primary

Drives pre-sales technical strategy and customer adoption for AI products.

Candidate Archetypes