Founding Solutions Architect

About Zelara

Most CRM marketing still blasts generic messages at scale and calls it "personalization." Our founders experienced this firsthand in senior roles at HelloFresh, Salesforce, Uber, and others. Backed by top-tier VCs, they decided to build a better way.

Zelara is an agentic lifecycle marketing platform that improves with every interaction. It works with the CRM infrastructure our customers already use, replacing static journeys and manual segmentation with a system that creates content, makes individual-level decisions, and learns from every outcome.

With bunq, Europe's second-largest neobank, we delivered +7.4% activation and +66% reactivation uplift, measured against a control group. We raised a €3M pre-seed and are generating revenue with paying enterprise customers. Now we are hiring our first Solutions Architect to make the path from integration to measurable value repeatable.

The Role

This is a deeply technical customer role centered on post-sales value realization, with involvement in pre-sales discovery. It is not conventional customer success built around reactive support and business reviews, nor a pre-sales role that hands off at signature.

You will own technical value realization for a portfolio of customers, from discovery and onboarding through live experiments, measured results, and scaled adoption.

You and the commercial lead run each account as a pair, in a weekly rhythm and in the room together for the conversations that decide something. They own pricing, proposals, contracts, conversion to an annual contract, expansion, and renewal. You own the technical plan and evidence behind those decisions. Before signature, you lead technical discovery alongside them. After signature, you become the customer's named technical lead, accountable for solution design, data mapping, the experiment plan, stakeholder coordination, and go-live. You make value real and defensible; the commercial lead owns the close.

There is no separate customer success manager, and we are not planning one. The two of you hold the whole relationship: the commercial lead is the account owner, you are the technical owner, and the working relationship with the customer's CRM, data, and analytics teams is yours.

Your focus is the customer-specific application of Zelara's platform. Product owns the roadmap and prioritization. Engineering owns production software, reusable integrations, reliability, and security. Science owns the learning methods and models, experimental methodology, and causal measurement standards. You turn their work into a functioning customer solution and bring in each team when a requirement crosses those boundaries.

Today our founders lead the technical side of every customer relationship. You will take over that responsibility and build the function as the customer base grows.

You will work with mid-market and enterprise B2C companies across Europe: fintech, e-commerce, travel, and employee benefits. Successful pilots grow into long-term, scaled deployments.

What You Will Do

• Own the technical customer journey from discovery through onboarding, pilot delivery, measured value, and scaled adoption

• Lead technical discovery before signature: understand how the customer makes money and which metric moves it, then validate the integration path, available data, measurement feasibility, and what the pilot can credibly promise

• Own onboarding: align stakeholders, define the data mapping and acceptance criteria, coordinate implementation, and take the customer live on its existing CRM stack

• Design and pre-register each customer experiment using Zelara's scientific standards: hypothesis, primary metric, cohort, control group, conversion window, success threshold, and decision rules, because a success bar set after seeing the data is not a result

• Own the customer-facing interpretation of results: reconcile Zelara's analysis with the customer's data, involve Science in novel or ambiguous analyses, and state clearly when the evidence is not decision-ready

• Enable the customer's team to operate campaigns independently rather than becoming the person who runs them

• Partner with the commercial lead on annual contracts, expansion, and renewal: identify the opportunity, quantify the value, and de-risk the technical plan

• Drive the product loop rather than report into it: turn recurring customer needs into product opportunities, engineering requirements, and research questions, and bring the evidence from live accounts that decides their priority

• Build what closes the gap in the meantime: use agents to produce the scripts, tooling, and prototypes that unblock an account before the platform covers it

Your First 90 Days

30 Days (Immersion): Learn the platform and customer portfolio, join every active account, and take ownership of your first technical customer relationship.

60 Days (Ownership): Lead one onboarding independently, with the integration requirements, campaign configuration, experiment design, and measurement plan agreed before launch.

90 Days (Scale): Own a small portfolio, deliver your first evidence-backed results readout, use it with the commercial lead to inform an annual-contract or expansion decision, and improve the playbook based on live accounts.

Who You Are

• You have led deployments, implementations, or technical accounts for mid-market or enterprise customers at a B2B SaaS company, and your work has influenced adoption, renewal, or expansion.

• You judge a customer's business before you design for it: which metric their leadership is measured on, which one is decoration, and what matters that nobody has said out loud. You aim the solution at the first.

• You can turn a business question into an analysis plan: define the right metric, cohort, and measurement window; identify what would disprove the claim; and judge whether the evidence is decision-ready.

• You have led real customer integrations and know that a successful import is not the same as usable data.

• You understand experiments: control groups, effect sizes, statistical power, conversion windows, and why the design has to be frozen before it runs.

• You know the lifecycle marketing stack (Braze, Bird, Iterable, Klaviyo, Customer.io, Emarsys, HubSpot): what it does well, where it stops, and how a CRM team works inside it.

• You are credible with a Head of CRM and their data engineer in the same hour, and you switch between them without losing either.

• You say the uncomfortable thing early, and a commitment with a date on it is a commitment.

• You want to build the function, not only perform the role.

• You are AI-native in how you work. A software engineering background is not a requirement. Building with agents is: the script that reshapes a customer's export, the prototype that shows a CRM team what we mean, the tooling that saves you the next ten hours.

• You are fluent in English. German is a strong advantage given our current market focus.

Bonus

• You have been the operator on the other side, running lifecycle or CRM programs in-house, so you know what we are asking a customer's team to change.

• You have experience with experimentation platforms, bandits, or applied ML in production.

• You have converted pilots or POCs into multi-year contracts and can say what actually moved the decision.

How We Work

We are an AI-first team. We use spec-driven workflows and AI-assisted execution across engineering and go-to-market, adopting what makes us faster and discarding what does not. We value evidence, speed, and clear ownership over process theater, status reporting, or activity for its own sake.

If you want to push the boundaries of how software gets delivered to customers, not just what gets delivered, you will fit right in.

What We Offer

• Work alongside founders who have built and sold an AI-driven SaaS business and led large-scale B2C operations from the customer's side of the table.

• A founding senior individual-contributor role in Solutions Architecture. You define the playbook now, with a path to build and lead the function as the customer base grows.

• Autonomy over onboarding, pilots, and technical value realization, with close partnership on account growth and a tight working relationship with Product, Science, and Engineering.

• Direct access to real customers and real production data.

• Based in Berlin with regular travel to European customers.

• A competitive salary and a meaningful equity stake, early enough to shape the company's direction.

• Your choice of a Deutschlandticket or bike subscription, plus a gym/fitness club membership.

Our Compass

We are guided by four core values:

• Seek Truth: We ground decisions in evidence. When the facts change, we change our mind.

• Act with Integrity: We build trust through transparency, reliability, and ownership.

• Put Customers First: We succeed only when they succeed.

• Accelerate Impact: We prefer speed, simplicity, and real learning over ceremony.

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