Solutions Architect

StepFun — Solutions Architect (AI Pre-Sales)

Location: San Francisco, CA | Full-time

About the Role

StepFun is looking for a hands-on Solutions Architect to work closely with our US sales team on client-facing technical engagements. You will own the full pre-sales technical cycle — client discovery, solution design, live demos, POC delivery, and basic integration — partnering with sales to close deals and drive revenue.

What You'll Do

Industry Solution Design

• Deeply understand client business pain points and translate StepFun's core capabilities — LLMs, AI Agents, multimodal models — into competitive commercial solutions
• Independently assess technical feasibility, cost, delivery timeline, and client ROI, ensuring every proposal is commercially viable and differentiated in the market

Client Technical Engagement & Pre-Sales Support

• Serve as the primary technical contact throughout the sales cycle, answering questions on LLM implementation, architecture fit, custom requirements, and technical bottlenecks
• Translate ambiguous business needs into standardized, actionable technical architecture proposals

POC Delivery & Hands-On Execution

• Own live product demos and end-to-end POC setup, testing, and validation
• Write basic integration code, optimize prompt engineering, debug API calls, build RAG knowledge bases, and configure Agent workflows — resolving architecture, performance, and compatibility issues to ensure successful POC outcomes

Full-Cycle Project Ownership & Deal Closure

• Guide AI projects from first technical conversation through POC validation, solution sign-off, and production handoff
• Identify and mitigate technical risks, partner with internal engineering and product teams to resolve delivery blockers, and collaborate with sales to accelerate deal closure

Market Feedback & Product Loop

• Synthesize on-the-ground customer needs, industry pain points, and competitive insights into regular feedback reports
• Feed insights back into StepFun's LLM platform, Agent framework, and product roadmap — keeping product capabilities aligned with real commercial use cases

What We're Looking For

• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, AI, Software Engineering, or a related technical field
• 2+ years of experience in solutions architecture or technical pre-sales within AI / cloud computing
• Bonus: prior SA experience at a major cloud provider, or technical pre-sales at an AI startup; hands-on experience shipping commercial LLM projects to production is a plus
• Strong command of the LLM ecosystem: prompt engineering, API integration, RAG, and Agent architecture
• Hands-on coding or vibe-coding ability — comfortable building and tuning demos and POCs independently