Principal Solution Architect
Sarvam AI
Bengaluru, IndiaPosted 5 months ago
S
Skill Required
Sales/GTMSolution ArchitectEngineeringbuildingdesignCloudAPIsGoAIMachine LearningFulltime
Key highlights
- Backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures
- 5-15 years of experience required
- Deal sizes ideally in the range of INR 1Cr+
- High ownership and high impact from day one
Role overview
The Principal Solution Architect at Sarvam serves as the senior trusted technical advisor for the company’s most strategic accounts, leading the technical selling motion. This player-coach role involves personally handling high-stakes pre-sales engagements while building the playbooks, processes, and team to scale the function. The role sits at the intersection of sales, product, and delivery, ensuring technical credibility translates into closed deals. Sarvam, backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures, works with leading Indian enterprises and public institutions to develop a full-stack sovereign AI platform tailored for India’s needs.
Responsibilities
- Lead the pre-sales function end-to-end: from technical qualification and solution design through to commercial proposal and deal closure support
- Personally own the most strategic and high-value pre-sales engagements across enterprise and government accounts
- Build the pre-sales playbook from scratch: demo frameworks, proposal templates, objection-handling guides, competitive positioning, and RFP response processes that the team uses on every deal
- Partner with GTM leadership on deal strategy, pricing, and go/no-go decisions for complex opportunities
- Work closely with product, engineering, and FDSE teams to ensure solutions are technically sound, deliverable, and aligned with Sarvam's product roadmap
- Build and maintain deep expertise across Sarvam's full product stack: Samvaad, Studio, Akshar, APIs, and custom deployment architectures
- Represent Sarvam's technical capabilities in CXO-level and procurement-level conversations with clarity and conviction
- Define and track pre-sales metrics: pipeline coverage, technical win rates, time-to-proposal, and demo-to-pilot conversion
- Recruit, mentor, and develop a high-performing pre-sales team as the function scales
Requirements
- 5-15 years of experience in pre-sales, solutions engineering, technical sales, or solutions consulting within enterprise B2B technology
- Proven track record of leading pre-sales for complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals (ideally with deal sizes in the range of INR 1Cr+)
- Strong technical acumen: ability to credibly discuss APIs, cloud architecture, AI/ML systems, and integration patterns with engineering teams on the client side
- Excellent communication and storytelling ability: translating technical capability into business outcomes for senior decision-makers
- Experience building and scaling pre-sales processes, collateral, and teams from early stage
- Comfort operating in a fast-moving startup environment where structure is something you create, not something you inherit
- Strong commercial instinct: understanding deal economics, pricing levers, and how to structure proposals that win
Nice to have
- Prior experience selling AI/ML products, conversational AI, or language technology platforms
- Deep familiarity with the Indian enterprise and government buying landscape, including procurement cycles, compliance requirements, and stakeholder dynamics
- Experience working with Forward Deployed Engineering or professional services teams in a post-sales or delivery-adjacent capacity
Benefits
- Work alongside researchers, engineers, builders, and business leaders who move fast and hold each other to a very high bar
- High ownership and high impact, from day one
- Everything we do is AI-first, from the way we build and ship to the way we think about problems
- Work on problems that could change how an entire country learns, works, and communicates
Additional details
- Sarvam is building the bedrock of Sovereign AI for India. The company is developing India's full-stack sovereign AI platform, building across research, models, infrastructure and applications with a singular focus on making AI genuinely work for India
- Sarvam works with leading enterprises and public institutions and is backed by Lightspeed, Peak XV, and Khosla Ventures
- Sarvam partners with India's leading brands, including Tata Capital, SBI Life, CRED, IDFC, and LIC
- Note: We are looking for people who can own the outcomes described here, not people who match every line of this specification. If this problem excites you and you believe you can do this work, we want to hear from you