Startup Solutions Architect, Early Stage Startups

Come work with the founders building whats next.

Some of the most important companies of the next decade are being built right now in San Francisco by two or three people and an idea. Were looking for someone who wants a front-row seat to all of them and the technical chops to help make them real.

Youll work across AI/ML FinTech ClimateTech healthcare consumer B2B SaaS and whatever gets invented next with many of these companies coming straight out of Y Combinator and other top accelerators or freshly backed by leading VC firms. They need a trusted technical voice in their corner from day one and you get to be it. Picture a small team with a technical founder and maybe a couple of engineers moving fast with Claude Code Codex and whatever tool shipped last week trying to make every product architecture and business decision at once. Theres no VP of Engineering to align with no platform team to hand things off to and no multi-quarter roadmap so for the startups you work with you become the closest thing they have to a fractional CTO or chief architect. Thats what makes this an adventure rather than a support role: you and the founders are figuring it out together and a single good decision can save six months of runway while a bad one can quietly sink the whole thing.

The work is bigger than architecture and it changes week to week. One week youre helping a team understand the architecture their coding agent quietly built for them and untangling the decisions they didnt realize theyd made the next youre figuring out how to scale after an unexpected viral launch and the week after that youre working a compliance problem with a FinTech startup that has to move fast but cant cut corners or talking a founder through a hard pivot and helping them separate what theyve already built from where the data says they should actually go. Youll prototype alongside them experiment with frontier AI and carry what you learn from hundreds of founders back into AWS so the products we build reflect what the leading edge actually needs.

We hire for a specific kind of person and it starts with founder empathy over enterprise process. You get that every dollar spent on infra is a dollar not spent on talent or growth that their timeline is measured in months of runway and that theyre emotionally all-in on this idea so you earn trust by genuinely caring whether the team survives rather than by showing off enterprise-grade architecture. That empathy shows up as survival-first thinking: before you recommend anything you understand their runway their burn their signals of product-market fit and their next milestone whether thats demo day a fundraise or a first paying customer.

To advise this well you have to see the full stack of the business letting technical choices product business model runway and the founders own risk tolerance all inform your recommendations because you cant advise on architecture without understanding burn rate. You stay a builder at heart since you dont stop being an engineer when you join this team; you prototype write code and get your hands dirty with new models Bedrock agents and RAG because thats how you stay credible with people who build for a living. And you act as a scout for the future spotting when a single startups tool choice becomes a cohort-wide trend twelve to twenty-four months before the rest of the market then carrying that signal back to AWS product and service teams. You dont have to already be a Solutions Architect to do this. Great people on this team have come from founding-engineer roles senior software engineering AI engineering and traditional SA backgrounds and if youre an excellent builder who loves customers we can teach you the AWS you need.

Key job responsibilities
- Act as a trusted technical advisor to a portfolio of early-stage founders designing architectures that are right-sized for where they are today and built to grow if and when they scale

- Get hands-on: prototype build reference patterns and demo working solutions alongside founders rather than handing them a generic playbook

- Help founders understand and improve the architectures their coding agents generated making sense of the decisions and tradeoffs baked into what theyve already shipped

- Help startups navigate the fast-moving GenAI landscape from selecting the right foundation models and AI services to shipping production-ready AI-powered products

- Guide founders through the real challenges of building GenAI applications including model cost latency accuracy safety and AI best practices

- Help founders make pragmatic build-and-scale decisions including when to keep architectures disposable and adaptable while the direction is still being validated

- Stay technically sharp by experimenting with new models agent frameworks and emerging tools so you can advise credibly across the entire stack

- Build and deepen relationships across San Franciscos startup ecosystem including top accelerators like Y Combinator incubators and leading VC firms

- Be a voice for your founders connecting their feedback and needs directly to AWS product and engineering teams to shape the tools being built for them

- Scout emerging technology trends across the startups you work with and translate those signals back into AWS product roadmaps

- Share your expertise at startup events demo days and developer meetups across the San Francisco ecosystem to build trust and visibility in the community

- 4 years of specific technology domain areas (e.g. software development cloud computing systems engineering infrastructure security networking data & analytics) experience
- 2 years of design implementation or consulting in applications and infrastructures experience
- Experience with designing and building application using AWS services such as Lambda AWS Elastic Beanstalk Kubernetes
- Experience conveying complex technical concepts to both technical and business audiences
- Hands-on experience building with GenAI such as foundation models agents RAG or fine-tuning in a prototype or production setting

- Experience as a startup founder founding engineer or early engineer at a pre-Series A company
- Fluency with modern agentic coding tools (e.g. Claude Code Codex) and the ability to reason about the architectures they generate
- Experience shipping GenAI applications to production including managing model cost latency accuracy and safety
- Depth in at least one technical or industry domain (e.g. AI/ML data & analytics security FinTech healthcare) paired with broad full-stack fluency
- Experience building data foundations for AI products such as vector databases data pipelines or retrieval systems

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status disability or other legally protected status.

Los Angeles County applicants: Job duties for this position include: work safely and cooperatively with other employees supervisors and staff; adhere to standards of excellence despite stressful conditions; communicate effectively and respectfully with employees supervisors and staff to ensure exceptional customer service; and follow all federal state and local laws and Company policies. Criminal history may have a direct adverse and negative relationship with some of the material job duties of this position. These include the duties and responsibilities listed above as well as the abilities to adhere to company policies exercise sound judgment effectively manage stress and work safely and respectfully with others exhibit trustworthiness and professionalism and safeguard business operations and the Companys reputation. Pursuant to the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process including support for the interview or onboarding process please visit for more information. If the country/region youre applying in isnt listed please contact your Recruiting Partner.

The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience qualifications and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical dental vision prescription Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans EAP Mental Health Support Medical Advice Line Flexible Spending Accounts Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage) 401(k) matching paid time off and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at CA San Francisco - 151000.00 - 204300.00 USD annually