Senior Solution Architect - Portland - Contentful GmbH

Description

About the Opportunity

We are hiring a Senior Personalization Solution Architect with deep domain expertise in personalization and experimentation to join Contentful's Professional Services team. This role is designed for a practitioner who has built, operated, and scaled personalization programs in production, and who also brings the hands‑on technical skills required to implement those programs in modern, composable architectures.

This is not a generalist Solution Architect role with light exposure to personalization. Success in this role requires strong opinions and real‑world experience across audience strategy, decisioning, experimentation, and measurement—paired with the ability to design and deliver high‑quality technical implementations using Contentful Personalization.

You will work directly with customer engineering, product, and marketing teams to design and implement advanced personalization and experimentation solutions, while also serving as a customer‑facing extension of Contentful's Product and Engineering teams. Your work will help reduce implementation risk, accelerate time to value, and create tighter feedback loops into product development—specifically for complex personalization use cases.

What to expect?

Personalization & Experimentation Domain Leadership

• Own the end‑to‑end design of personalization and experimentation programs, including:
• audience and segmentation strategies grounded in behavioral, contextual, and first‑party data
• experience decisioning models that balance relevance, performance, and governance
• experimentation frameworks (A/B, multivariate, holdouts) with clear hypotheses and success criteria
• Design personalization strategies that scale responsibly, including:
• guardrails to prevent over‑personalization, bias, and degraded user experience
• approaches for global, multi‑brand, or multi‑region deployments
• tradeoffs between targeting precision, latency, and operational complexity
• Define measurement approaches that connect:
• Act as a domain authority for personalization and experimentation in customer engagements, confidently guiding technical and non‑technical stakeholders through best practices, limitations, and tradeoffs.

Technical Solution Architecture & Hands-On Delivery

• Architect and implement end‑to‑end personalization solutions using Contentful Personalization, including:
• user identification and profile stitching
• audience evaluation and decisioning
• personalized content and experience delivery
  experimentation and uplift measurement
• Lead hands‑on implementation activities such as:
• building proof‑of‑concepts and reference implementations
• configuring personalization models and decision logic
• developing integration services and APIs
• supporting production deployments and performance optimization
• Integrate personalization solutions with enterprise platforms including:
• identity, consent, and privacy tooling
• SSR, CSR, SSG, ISR
• edge and CDN‑based personalization
• hybrid static + runtime personalization approaches
• Ensure solutions meet enterprise requirements for:
• performance and scalability
• reliability and fallback behavior
• security and privacy compliance

Technical Discovery & Customer Enablement

• Lead technical discovery sessions to assess customer readiness across:
• data quality, identity maturity, and event instrumentation
• architectural constraints (latency, caching, edge delivery)
• content model alignment and operational workflows
• Translate personalization requirements into detailed technical designs, including:
• integration patterns and API contracts
• data and event schemas
• deployment and observability considerations
• Enable customer teams through:
• implementation workshops and pair‑programming
• architecture and code reviews
• developer documentation and operational runbooks

Cross-Functional Collaboration & Feedback Loops

• Partner closely with Contentful Product and Engineering teams to:
• surface implementation challenges and recurring customer pain points
• provide feedback that influences roadmap, developer experience, and documentation
• validate new personalization capabilities against real customer use cases
• Contribute to internal enablement by:
• mentoring Solution Architects and delivery team members
• developing reusable accelerators, patterns, and reference architectures
• supporting Sales and Solution Engineering with technical expertise in complex personalization opportunities

What you need to be successful?

• Demonstrated, hands‑on experience designing and operating personalization and experimentation programs in production, including:
• ownership of audience strategy and decisioning logic
• designing and running A/B or multivariate experiments beyond basic UI testing
• interpreting experiment results and translating them into iterative improvements
• Strong understanding of personalization challenges such as:
• identity resolution and anonymous vs known users
• data sparsity and cold‑start scenarios
• experimentation validity, bias, and statistical tradeoffs
• privacy, consent, and regulatory constraints

Required: Technical & Architectural Skills

• Advanced proficiency with modern web technologies:
  • JavaScript / TypeScript
  • React with (preferred), or Vue/Nuxt, Angular
  • REST and GraphQL APIs
• Deep understanding of web rendering and delivery patterns:
  • SSR, CSR, SSG, ISR
  • caching strategies and personalization at scale
• Strong experience integrating SaaS platforms and enterprise systems via APIs
• Experience designing or implementing cloud‑native architectures (AWS, Azure, or GCP), including:
  • serverless or microservices‑based systems
  • event‑driven or streaming architectures

Professional Services & Collaboration Skills

• Experience delivering customer‑facing technical engagements in a consulting or professional services context
• Comfortable leading technical deep dives with engineering teams and explaining experimentation concepts to non‑technical stakeholders
• Strong written communication skills, especially technical documentation

Nice to Have

• Experience with CDPs, tag management systems, and event pipelines
• Familiarity with ML‑driven personalization approaches (e.g., propensity models, recommenders), even if models are externally managed
• Experience working in composable DXP ecosystems (CMS, personalization, experimentation, commerce)

What Success Looks Like

• Customers successfully deploy production‑grade personalization and experimentation programs using Contentful Personalization.
• Personalization solutions you design are:
• measurable and outcome‑driven
• performant at enterprise scale
• governed and extensible over time
• Customer engineering teams trust your guidance because you bring deep personalization domain expertise backed by hands‑on implementation experience.
• Product and Engineering teams benefit from clear, actionable feedback rooted in real customer implementations.
• Contentful is consistently seen as a credible personalization partner, not just a technology vendor.

What's in it for you?

• Join an ambitious tech company reshaping the way people build digital experiences
• Full-time employees receive Stock Options for the opportunity to share in the success of our company
• Comprehensive healthcare package covering 100% of monthly health premiums for employees and 85% of costs for your dependents.
• Fertility and family building benefits, including a lifetime reimbursable wallet to support your growing family.
• We value Work‑Life balance and You Time A generous amount of paid time off, including vacation days, sick days, compassion days for loss, education days, and volunteer days
• Company paid parental leave to care for and focus on your growing family
• Use your personal annual education budget to improve your skills and grow in your career
• Enjoy a full range of virtual and in‑person events, including workshops, guest speakers, and fun team activities, supporting learning and networking exchange beyond the usual work duties
• An annual wellbeing stipend to care for your physical, financial, or emotional health
• A monthly communication stipend and phone hardware upgrade reimbursement.
• New hire office equipment stipend for hybrid or distributed employees. Get the gear you need to work at your best.

This role will need to be conducted in a state in which we are currently registered to do business.

Who are we?

Contentful is a leading digital experience platform that helps modern businesses meet the growing demand for engaging, personalized content at scale. By blending composability with native AI capabilities, Contentful enables dynamic personalization, automated content delivery, and real‑time experimentation, powering next‑generation digital experiences across brands, regions, and channels for more than 4,200 organizations worldwide. More than 700 people from more than 70 nations contribute their energy and creativity to Contentful, working from hubs in Berlin, Denver, San Francisco, London, New York, and distributed worldwide.

Everyone is welcome here

"Everyone is welcome here" is a celebrated component of our culture. At Contentful, we strive to create an inclusive environment that empowers our employees. We believe that our products and services benefit from our diverse backgrounds and experiences, and we are proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applications will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, age, physical [dis]ability, or length of time spent unemployed. We invite you to apply and join us

If you need reasonable accommodations at any point during the application or interview process, please let your recruiting coordinator know.

Please be aware of scammers who may fraudulently allege to be from Contentful. These types of fraud can be carried out through copycat websites, fake email addresses claiming to be from our company, or social media. We do not ask for your personal information, such as bank account numbers, identification numbers, etc, through social media or chat‑based apps, nor do we request or send money for the purchase of business equipment. If you suspect fraud, please report it to your local authorities, as well as reach out to us at security- with any information you may have.

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