Canada-Based: Solutions Architect

Job Summary: 

You are passionate about education technology and love the deeper technical aspects of SaaS platforms. Your curiosity leads you down paths that promote future technological solutions that make life better for anyone in need. You enjoy seeking out and solving complex challenges that can simplify and improve how many organizations use technology. You are the type of person who sees any problem as an opportunity to build success. You are keen to bring your technical acumen, creativity and enthusiasm to D2L to help us transform the way the world learns. 

Our customers’ ability to grow and succeed depends on trusted integration with their tech ecosystem. Your mission will be to help customers find solutions that connect their technical and integration requirements to D2L products.  

As a Solutions Architect, you are the main technical escalation point for our Solutions Engineers (also known as Sales Engineers or SEs). When technical challenges go beyond the scope or expectation of SE knowledge, you will assist with scoping requirements and presenting technical solutions to help win sales opportunities. Additionally, you will serve in an advisory capacity for selling and positioning implementation and consulting services necessary to achieve a customer’s technical goals, in collaboration with D2L’s Services teams.   

You demonstrate a strong sense of urgency and understand the concepts of providing an excellent customer experience within a sales support role. You have an equal love for technical solutioning (the how) and deeply understanding a customer’s business challenges, technical requirements, and goals (the why). 

How You Will Make an Impact:  

• Sales Support: Partnering with Solutions Engineers (SEs) as a technical expert and escalation point for sales opportunities: scoping complex technical requirements, writing responses, and presenting technical solutions as required. 
• Customer Engagement: In collaboration with SEs, engaging with prospective and current customers to deeply understand their technical challenges, business goals, and integration needs; and presenting a compelling case for how we will best support. 
• Technical Solution Design: Designing, documenting, and presenting solutions for sales opportunities related to technical and partner integrations, security, data exchange, implementation, and more.
• Value Orientated Delivery: Building trust with both customers and internal stakeholders by using strong value-orientation to understand the ultimate business goals and challenges to solve for, and designing the most effective technological solution aligned to those goals. Using strong communication skills to clearly articulate the impact of your proposed solution to driving success to goals.   
• Risk Mitigation: Assessing and mitigating potential blockers to a technical win in sales opportunities; assessing and mitigating risks that might hinder the successful delivery and implementation of proposed technical solutions.
• Implementation Success: Be a liaison between our implementation teams and sales opportunity teams to ensure technical knowledge is documented and transferred for a successful implementation.
• Technical Enablement: As a Solutions Architect you will also have the opportunity to contribute materials and expertise for enablement and work with internal SME teams (Implementation, Sales, Product Management) to identify and fill information gaps that help Solutions Engineers communicate basic to intermediate level technical concepts. This may require creating re-usable assets, responding to one-off requests for information, or assisting other groups in creating and maintaining assets. 

What You’ll Bring to the Role:

• Experience in education technology, particularly with Learning Management System (LMS) administration / integration; deep knowledge and experience with Brightspace a must   
• Experience in a technical sales, consulting, or similar client-facing role 
• Experience interpreting and responding to technical requirements (such as within RFPs), gathering client requirements, and/or writing SOWs would be an asset  
• Background in teaching and learning industry would be an asset (Higher Education, K-12, and/or Corporate Learning)  
• Familiarity with enterprise software sales process; previous sales support would be an asset 
• Demonstrated ability to understand complex business challenges and apply creativity and problem-solving to meet client needs 
• Understanding of the technology ecosystem that surrounds an LMS and typical integration needs – including: 
  • Systems of record (SIS/HRIS/AMS/CRM) 
  • Authentication concepts (SAML/SSO, LDAP, JIT provisioning) 
  • Third-party tool integration (LTI, API, IPaaS)  
  • Data integration concepts (programmatic flat file transfer, API, relational database management, BI tools, EDW)  
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, effectively articulating technical concepts to a varied audience 
• Strong presentation skills, with the ability to convince and persuade 
• Team oriented, collaborative problem solver attitude – fosters collaborative and positive relationships between team members, sales, services, and other internal teams  
• Leadership, initiative and execution – identifies organizational and informational gaps; defines and executes plans to close gaps; takes leadership in problem solving in collaboration with others; drives solutioning from problem definition to close 
• Organization and analytical skills– sound time management and self-organization skills, managing multiple projects simultaneously with varying complexities  
• Ability to work remotely with a distributed team and travel occasionally