About the Role
The Principal Solution Architect is the senior trusted technical advisor across Sarvam's most strategic accounts and owns the technical selling motion at Sarvam. You will lead how Sarvam shows up in front of enterprise prospects: the quality of demos, the sharpness of proposals, the credibility of technical conversations, and the speed at which deals progress from interest to commitment. You and your team are the trusted technical counterparts to every customer's technology decision maker, and you own the pre-sales motion that converts technical credibility into closed deals.
This is a player-coach role. You will personally run the most complex and high-stakes pre-sales engagements while building the playbooks, processes, and eventually the team that scales this function. You will sit at the intersection of sales, product, and delivery, ensuring that what gets sold is what can be built, deployed, and supported. You will shape deal strategy with the GTM leadership and hold the pre-sales function accountable for pipeline velocity and win rates.
Sarvam sells to India's largest enterprises and public institutions. The deals are complex, the stakeholders are senior, and the expectations are high. If you thrive in that environment and can bring both technical depth and commercial sharpness, this role is built for you.
What You'll Do
- 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
What We're Looking For
- 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: you can credibly discuss APIs, cloud architecture, AI/ML systems, and integration patterns with engineering teams on the client side
- Excellent communication and storytelling ability: you translate 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: you understand deal economics, pricing levers, and how to structure proposals that win
Bonus Points
- 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