at Lumen in Springfield, Illinois, United States
Job Description
About Lumen
Lumen connects the world. We are igniting business growth by connecting people, data and applications – quickly, securely, and effortlessly. Together, we are building a culture and company from the people up – committed to teamwork, trust and transparency. People power progress.
Lumen’s commitment to workplace inclusion and employee support shines bright. We’ve made the Newsweek 2024 Greatest Workplaces for Diversity list and achieved a perfect score of 100 on the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index (CEI) for the fifth consecutive year. Plus, we’re the top employer in the communications and telecom industry, ranking 12th overall across all industries in The American Opportunity Index.
We’re looking for top-tier talent and offer the flexibility you need to thrive and deliver lasting impact. Join us as we digitally connect the world and shape the future.
Location
The professional in this position must reside in the USA and may work from home when not in team or client meetings.
The Role
We are looking for a Solution Architect who is passionate about leveraging technology innovation for the betterment of humanity. This exciting customer-facing solution engineering role will work in partnership with our Sales & Customer Success Executives, leading innovative conversations that help shape the growth of our enterprise customers as they embrace the 4th Industrial Evolution. Solution Architect design and architect solutions utilizing our technology services platform. The successful Solution Architect must have a strong desire to leverage their technical and sales skills, including business acumen, to understand business requirements, develop a technical sales strategy, and effectively present solutions that address our customers’ requirements and provide business value.
The Solution Architect will be responsible for analyzing customer needs and requirements through strategic discovery, utilizing technical thought leadership, discussing industry best practices, and presenting our product offerings to prospects and customers based on each customer’s specific business requirements. Recommending and proposing solutions to our customers with a goal to become a trusted advisor by highlighting how our products solutions enabling digital business strategies
The Main Responsibilities
Customer Meetings: Proactively leads and attends customer meetings in person and via collaboration tools. Prepares and delivers technical proposals and presentations with the appropriate level of business acumen for the audience. Provides broad scope responses to solution and technology questions. Ongoing thought leadership to forecast potential opportunities and/or challenges, then driving internal and external resources to enable or resolve. Demonstrates advanced solution-selling abilities and effective, pro-active customer communications. Interacts with all levels of customer’s management team.
Customer Solution Development: Analyze and identify our customer’s business and technology objectives, conduct full technical discovery, and architect client solutions to meet gathered requirements. Assess business and operational impact by technology. Craft and propose custom solutions that differentiate Lumen’s services, and meet customer’s requirements and objectives by asking probing questions that are meaningful to the customer to collect information that enables the sales team to be more effective and responsive to customer’s needs. Independently completes highly complex and custom designs. Influence customer strategy though technical thought leadership to enable and accelerate customer objectives.
Internal and External Training: Advises customers, sales and customer success on technical aspects of proposed solutions including fit to customer’s needs, features, availability, potential risk, etc.
Thought Leadership: Internal feedback loop to product management, sales and customer success leadership teams regarding the customer experience, product features/functionality, and service implementation/management.
Customer Advocate: Acts as customer advocate, participating in pre-sales efforts including technical sales presentations, architecture design discussions, proof-of-concept engagements, RFP/RFI responses, solution demonstrations, and technical workshops. Deliver findings including key pain points, proposed solutions to meet business needs, and ROI where applicable. Contribute to development of technical sales strategy. Design, architect and demonstrate visionary solutions in a way that closely reflects our customers technology roadmap.
Strong focus on building and growing personal brand to establish trusted advisor status with internal and external customers.
Lifecycle / Ecosystem Partnership: Support local sales teams in pursuit of key business opportunities, engage customers to address aspects of the data lifecycle. Collaborate with Client Success Executive/Manager, Solution Sales Overlay teams, and Product Management to deliver the appropriate solution and establish credibility and trust with the customer.
What We Look For in a Candidate
+ Experience in solution consulting – ITIL.
+ Strong understanding in Cloud & Architecture design.
+ Strong understanding in Network Functions Virtualization.
+ Strong understanding in Security solutions.
+ Minimum 5 years of experience with technology focused in pre-sales, engineering, consulting or similar background.
+ Technical pre-sales and/or consulting experience with a progressive track record of increasing levels of solution complexity and responsibility.
+ Possess knowledge of Enterprise Architecture and Design with ability to act autonomously across multiple technology areas. (Global network infrastructure, edge cloud capabilities, connected security, communication and collaboration services).
+ Communication: Ability to independently orchestrate & lead discussions with clients across many levels including C-level, VPs and Directors within IT.
+ Ability to understand the economic implications of a technical solutions. Can lead discussions with internal stakeholders to construct Total Cost of Ownership & evaluate Return on Investments for large enterprise customers when identifying & crafting customer solutions.
+ Approach: Highly proactive, consultative, creative and positive with a can-do attitude even in the most difficult circumstances.
+ Problem Solving: Expert problem-solving skills and ability to methodically understand and resolve complex issues across multiple products to integrate into a seamless customer solution. Must demonstrate the ability to focus ambiguous customer needs into specific, deliverable requirements. Must demonstrate creative solution development.
+ Work Style: Ability to work independently, part of a team or pull together and lead a team to build complex customer solutions. Must be able to build strong team relationships and easily transfer technical information.
+ Excellent presentation skills as well as the ability to build and present high-quality solutions to both technical and executive audiences that articulate the business value of the technical solution.
+ Some Travel required.
+ Education: B.S or equivalent work experience in the private sector or military
+ Industry certifications are a plus
Compensation
The starting salary for this role differs based on the employee’s primary work location. Employees typically do not start at the top of the range, though compensation depends on each individual’s qualifications.
Location Based Pay Ranges
$104740 – $139650 in these states: AR, ID, KY, LA, ME, MS, NE, SC, and SD.
$110250 – $147000 in these states: AZ, AL, FL, GA, IN, IA, KS, MO, MT, NM, ND, OH, OK, PA, TN, UT, VT, WV, WI, and WY.
$115770 – $154350 in these states: CO, HI, MI, MN, NV, NH, NC, OR, and RI.
**$12128
