What we're building
At Tidelift, we are creating a mutually beneficial commercial model for open source where both creators and enterprise users get what they need, and the world gets even more healthy and secure software that improves our lives. We are the only company that partners with open source maintainers and pays them to:
1) implement industry-leading secure software development practices and validate the practices they follow so organizations can have the same confidence in the security of their open source that they have in their own code, and
2) contractually commit to continue these practices into the future so that organizations can confidently make long term investments in the packages they use.
We're well-funded and growing fast. You will play a large role in tackling challenging problems and helping expand the company, while learning alongside our experienced, values-driven, and remote-first team.
Find out more about us on tidelift.com, listen to this recent podcast interview with our CEO Donald Fischer, this keynote presentation by cofounder Luis Villa and maintainer Jordan Harband at our annual Upstream conference, or read about how one large organization saved over $1.6M in manual package evaluation time and eliminated over 3000 points of risk in applications running in production by using Tidelift.
The role
Tidelift is seeking a Senior Solutions Architect, reporting to our Head of Customer Success. At Tidelift, Solutions Architects act as customer-facing product experts, sharing knowledge with prospects and customers through demos, hands-on enablement, presentations, technical evaluations, and ongoing post-sales interaction. A Solutions Architect is a key partner with our Sales team in ensuring customers understand the value and technical use cases for our products, as well as helping post-sale customers realize their strategic objectives and maximize value from their investment in Tidelift. Additionally, the Solutions Architect serves as the liaison between the customer and the Tidelift organization, collaborating with Product Management, Engineering, Sales, Customer Success, and others. They play a key role in the continuous feedback loop required for Tidelift’s ongoing success, and in refining our sales process. Solutions Architect is an individual contributor (IC) role.
Our prospects are primarily engineering, security, IT, or Open Source program leaders at companies ranging in size from 5,000 employees and up. Tidelift is working with companies to make it simple to trust, ship, and grow Open Source. Our product is not overly complicated, but our audience is very technical. As a product, Tidelift is all about helping our customers better manage Open Source usage in their companies and get more value out of it. Familiarity with the software development life-cycle, and the role Open Source plays in software development, as well as the day-to-day job of a software developer or team manager, will be strongly to your advantage in this role.
Responsibilities:
- Partner with the sales team:
- for technical demonstrations, presentations and discussions with prospects throughout the sales process, ensuring prospective customers understand the technical and business value of investing in Tidelift’s products
- to develop and lead proof-of-concept and pilot efforts to aid prospects in their decision-making
- Provide immediate technical onboarding activities such as installation and training following investment in Tidelift by customers
- Provide in enablement and workshops to help customers and prospects leverage the full value of the Tidelift solution
- Provide insights to customers with respect to the availability and applicability of new features of the Tidelift solution
- Work with customers to understand and resolve complex Tidelift technical questions, issues or escalations
- Build deep relationships with people within customer and prospect environments to enable them to be Tidelift advocates
- Author scripts and reports to assist with customer automation and repeatable internal analyses
- Collaborate internally with Product and Engineering to take customer and prospect feedback to help improve the product
- Continuously improve your professional skills with a focus on personal mastery and team learning
- Assist in interviewing and team-building
Characteristics:
- Strong desire to serve the cause of improving Open Source Software
- Alignment with Tidelift's core values of being inclusive, optimistic, additive, and practical
- Enthusiasm for working in a remote-first environment
- Ability to effectively and creatively solve difficult problems, whether they are technical or interpersonal in nature
- 5-7+ years of experience in the software industry is required
- At least 2 of which must include customer-facing responsibilities (e.g. sales or sales engineering, customer success, consulting)
- Exceptional verbal, written, and presentation skills, especially in technical demonstrations and discussions
- Proven ability to communicate with and influence internal and external developers, stakeholders, and executives
- Deep knowledge of software development lifecycle, development pipelines, DevOps processes and technologies
- Understanding of the role Open Source software plays in modern software development
- Understanding of software supply-chain assurance (especially as it applies to Open Source software), dependency management, and/or risk analysis
- Experience working with organizations of all sizes, especially enterprises
- Strong technical, analytic and problem solving skills
- Professional experience in at least one of DevOps, Security, Open Source, and Engineering is required
- Availability and willingness to travel up to 20% (mainly US domestic) for events, conferences, and onsite visits with customers
- Ability to manage time and energy effectively in a remote environment
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, or equivalent experience
- Security clearance a plus
Starting pay:
- $165,000 per year base salary
- Opportunity to earn up to$40,000 per year in variable compensation
- Generous stock option grant
Our values
We’re trying to build a healthy, values-driven culture. We want to be:
- Optimistic:We see an amazing future ahead, and want to inspire others to share in it. This is both internal—building each other up and looking for the best in people—and external—we know open source is awesome, and we want to make it even better.
- Practical:We know words and ideas alone won’t change lives. We help people most by creating a pragmatic, viable, and sustainable business that works for everyone. So we care about usability, design, and honest assessment of costs and benefits.
- Additive:We want an environment that encourages and inspires growth, both for individuals and for the open source community as a whole. That means embracing a growth mindset, and valuing culture-add over culture-fit.
- Inclusive:We believe technology will be stronger when it better reflects the voices and ideas of society as a whole. So we want people from different backgrounds and experiences to not just be represented, but to be heard, valued, and flourish. We do not tolerate discrimination or harassment.
To find out more about how we live these in practice, we’ve written more aboutliving our values “inside and out”.
Working at Tidelift
We are (and have been) remote-first from day 1. In this role you would have the option to work remotely from anywhere in the US. We get together in person 2-4 times a year, so some ability to travel is required (though we aim not to require travel on weekends). We’ve written more about how we do remote work here,here, andhere.
We believe in the urgency of our mission and the importance of doing good work, but also know this is a marathon and not a sprint. Hours are flexible when necessary to meet personal needs (like child, medical, or elder care).
Compensation, benefits and career
Tidelift’sapproach to compensationis designed to ensure that we are staying true to our core values of being optimistic, additive, inclusive, and practical. We do this by:
- Rewarding tenure: We are optimists, believing that each of us is bringing our best to work each day. In this spirit, we provide predetermined raises of at least 3% each year based on the belief that you are working hard and learning more about Tidelift and your role, making yourself more valuable to the company every day. Each year we will refresh our model for rewarding tenure with new market data, and share an updated compensation trajectory with you.
- Holding firmly to a no-negotiation policy: In the spirit of our values to be inclusive and additive, we believe employees hired to perform the same role should receive the same compensation, regardless of location, negotiation prowess, prior salary, or years of experience prior to joining Tidelift. All Tidelift offers have compensation packages that are determined prior to the start of recruitment. This, along with a structured interview process, is intended to mitigate the effects of bothshifting criteria biasand theask gapon wages within Tidelift, and is an essential element of our equity, diversity, and inclusion strategy.
- Sharing our process transparently.You and your colleagues are doing important work, and we want to compensate you fairly in return. We transparently document how we approach compensation at Tidelift, including our methodology for calculating initial offers, raises, and promotions, so that you know exactly what you can expect from us over your career here.
In addition to cash and equity compensation, Tidelift offers medical, dental, vision, disability, and life insurance as well as the ability to contribute pre-tax dollars to flexible spending and retirement (401k) accounts. As a remote-first company, we offer a variety of remote work stipends to cover expenses such as co-working spaces, internet, and phone connections. Finally, all employees have access to generous vacation and gender-neutral parental leave policies as well as the ability to reimburse up to $5k annually for their own professional development.
How to apply
Fill out the form below. We'd love it if you add a thoughtful note about your goals and your background. We’ll get back to you promptly!