Principal Customer Architect

About the Role:

Netomi is seeking a Principal Customer Architect - the senior-most technical individual contributor in our Customer Engineering organization. You will own the technical arc of the accounts where the stakes are highest - first-of-kind deployments, peak-event scale, regulated industries - and set the architecture, governance, and quality standards the entire Customer Architect function operates by.

Getting an AI agent live is no longer the hard part. The hard part is what comes after the pilot: expanding from one use case to twenty, holding quality as policies and systems change underneath you, proving containment and CSAT to a CIO, and earning the right to the next set of journeys. Solving that repeatably, across every account, is the job. The Principal Customer Architect is where the hardest versions of that problem land - and where the patterns that solve them for everyone else get written.

You are deeply credible in a design review - able to read an execution trace, reason about why an agent chose the wrong tool, and design guardrails and evaluation strategy. You set the architecture and own quality sign-off; our Agentic Deployment team executes. Your leverage comes from architecture, judgment, and the standards you set for others: the reference architectures, evaluation frameworks, and playbooks the function deploys from. The operating principle: make deployments prescriptive and repeatable, not bespoke.

Responsibilities:

Account Architecture:

• Design the end-to-end agent architecture across the customer's journeys and channels - chat, email, voice, SMS, in-app - including agent decomposition, escalation and handoff design, and how autonomous and human-in-the-loop modes divide the work.
• Design the integration blueprint against the customer's real stack: CRM and ticketing (Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow), telephony and contact center, identity, loyalty and reservations systems, order and payments, and data platform.
• Set the guardrail, governance, and observability architecture: define what the agent must never do, how that is enforced, how it is audited, and what the customer's compliance and risk teams see.
• Set the architecture and governance standard the Agentic Deployment team executes against, and own quality sign-off before anything reaches production.

Technical Success Planning:

• Author and maintain a Technical Success Plan per account: current-state architecture, target-state architecture, the sequenced roadmap between them, and the metrics defining success at each stage.
• Define the measurement model with the customer up front - containment, resolution rate, CSAT/DSAT, deflection economics, handle time, escalation quality, cost per resolution - and hold both sides to it.
• Run a recurring technical business review with customer leadership: what shipped, what it moved, what's next, and what's at risk.

Adoption & Technical Expansion:

• Own the technical expansion path for land-and-expand: chat to email to voice to employee-facing, plus new intents, lines of business, regions, and languages.
• Identify expansion opportunities from technical reality rather than wishful mapping, size the work honestly, and hand qualified opportunity to the account team.
• Anticipate what breaks at the next order of magnitude - peak-event volume, new policy regimes, upstream system migrations - and get ahead of it in the roadmap.

Trusted Technical Advisor:

• Hold the primary technical relationship with senior stakeholders: VP/Head of Customer Experience, Director of Contact Center Technology, enterprise architects, security and compliance leadership, and often the CIO.
• Advise on the parts of the program Netomi doesn't own - knowledge base quality, policy clarity, agent operating model, org readiness - because agent performance depends on all of it.
• Deliver hard technical news early and clearly. Credibility is built on accurate expectation-setting, not optimism.

Partner Co-Delivery:

• Set the architecture and quality standard that SI delivery partners build against.
• Certify and enable partner delivery teams; scale through them rather than absorbing all delivery work.
• Maintain quality sign-off regardless of who executes.

Prescriptive Playbooks:

• Contribute to vertical deployment blueprints - airline, insurance, gaming, media - covering reference architecture, guardrail configuration, evaluation packs, and expansion paths.
• Turn what works in one account into prescriptive onboarding and day-2 playbooks the whole organization deploys from.

Product Collaboration:

• Translate field observation into specific, evidenced, pattern-based product input - quantified, not anecdotal.
• Be a named internal voice on enterprise requirements: security posture, deployment topology, model flexibility, and auditability.

Escalation & Incident Response:

• Lead the technical side of escalations: quality regressions, integration failures, and incidents during peak events.
• Drive root-cause analysis with Engineering and communicate it to the customer with precision and appropriate accountability.

Function-Level Technical Leadership:

• Define and own the architecture, governance, and quality standards for the Customer Architect function: reference architectures, guardrail patterns, evaluation frameworks, and sign-off criteria.
• Own the hardest technical problems in the portfolio - first-of-kind deployments, peak-event scale, novel compliance regimes - and convert their solutions into function-wide standards.
• Mentor Senior and staff-level Customer Architects; act as the escalation point for architecture decisions across accounts.
• Represent Customer Engineering's technical position to executive leadership, Product, and Engineering, and shape platform direction based on aggregate field evidence.

Requirements:

• 12+ years in customer-facing technical roles - solutions architecture, technical account management, forward-deployed engineering, implementation architecture, or technical consulting - including sustained ownership of post-sales technical outcomes.
• Recognized technical authority at prior companies: the architect others escalated to, with demonstrated ownership of the largest and most complex enterprise accounts at Fortune 500 scale.
• Genuine technical depth: reads code and API documentation, reasons about distributed systems and integration architecture, debugs a failing data flow, and holds their own with a customer's principal engineer.
• Working understanding of LLM-based systems - prompting, tool use, retrieval, evaluation, guardrails, failure modes - and judgment about where they are and aren't the right answer.
• Consultative and prescriptive: builds playbooks, not one-offs.
• Moves between a CIO conversation about business outcomes and an engineering conversation about trace-level agent behavior without losing either audience.
• Comfort with ambiguity and a bias toward writing things down.
• Track record defining architecture standards, methodologies, or playbooks adopted beyond your own accounts - at practice, function, or company level.
• Experience influencing product direction at an enterprise software company through structured, evidenced field input.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience co-delivering through SI partners - enabling delivery teams rather than doing all the work directly.
• CX, contact center, or conversational AI background - CCaaS, CRM/ticketing ecosystems, IVR and voice, workforce management.
• Depth in a core vertical: airlines and travel, media and streaming, gaming and sports betting, financial services and insurance, or retail.
• Familiarity with enterprise security and compliance - SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, ISO 27001 - without escalating to Legal for every question.
• Experience designing evaluation frameworks or quality programs for non-deterministic systems.