Principal Solutions Architect

About Coalfire

Coalfire is on a mission to make the world a safer place by solving our clients’ hardest cybersecurity challenges. We work at the cutting edge of technology to advise, assess, automate, and ultimately help companies navigate the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape. We are headquartered in Chicago, Illinois with offices across the U.S. and U.K., and we support clients around the world.

But that’s not who we are – that’s just what we do.

We are thought leaders, consultants, and cybersecurity experts, but above all else, we are a team of passionate problem-solvers who are hungry to learn, grow, and make a difference.

The Principal Solutions Architect provides technical, business, and compliance expertise to define practical, value-based solutions for Coalfire clients. The role supports Compliance and Assurance solutions and works across Coalfire’s broader portfolio, including Advisory and Risk Management and Application and Offensive Security.

The Principal Solutions Architect leads complex technical sales pursuits from qualification through close, serving as a trusted advisor to clients and an integrator across Business Development, delivery, product, partnerships, and executive leadership. The role translates client objectives, regulatory obligations, technology realities, delivery dependencies, and commercial constraints into clear solution approaches, scopes, proposals, and implementation pathways. This person is expected to operate effectively in strategic accounts, including situations requiring ambiguity reduction, escalation management, scope governance, and coordinated action across multiple internal and client stakeholders.

• Lead technical and business conversations for strategic or complex client opportunities, including discovery, qualification, needs assessment, executive briefings, workshops, and solution validation.
• Build trusted-advisor relationships with key client stakeholders; understand their evolving priorities, risks, operating constraints, and decision process.
• Translate business objectives and compliance obligations into practical solution options, including assumptions, tradeoffs, sequencing, dependencies, and client decisions required to proceed.
• Support executive-level account strategy, customer escalation management, and coordinated internal response when solution, scope, delivery, or commercial issues place an opportunity or relationship at risk.
• Maintain continuity from pre-sales into delivery by clarifying intended outcomes, handoffs, open decisions, and success criteria with client and internal stakeholders.

• Serve as solution architect for complex client requirements, defining client-specific approaches across compliance, cloud, security, technology, and operating-model considerations.
• Drive pre-sales technical activities from opportunity identification through closing, including discovery calls, needs assessments, solution scoping, proof of concepts, pilots, and technical validation.
• Partner with Business Development, delivery, finance, and other internal teams to develop proposals, statements of work, pricing models, estimates, assumptions, and value narratives.
• Develop and present architecture diagrams, implementation roadmaps, solution demonstrations, presentations, RFI/RFP responses, and other technical validation artifacts that make complex decisions understandable.
• Support client negotiations by explaining solution rationale, scope boundaries, commercial assumptions, delivery approach, and the value of Coalfire’s recommendations.
• Identify and articulate opportunities for cross-sell and expansion across Coalfire service lines when they materially improve client outcomes.

• Establish and maintain clarity on scope, responsibilities, technical boundaries, prerequisites, dependencies, assumptions, and change-control requirements for complex pursuits and engagements.
• Partner with delivery teams and client stakeholders to align solution design with operational realities, delivery capacity, implementation…