Solution Architect

Please note that candidates must have the right to work in Italy and be based in the country for this role

About Exelab

Exelab is a technology partner for enterprise companies, specializing in custom digital applications that enhance customer engagement, streamline business processes, and enable data-driven decision-making.

We are a HubSpot Elite partner, Twilio Gold partner, and AWS partner. We work with leading brands to deliver scalable, high-performance solutions tailored to their needs — going beyond execution to create measurable value across CRM, marketing automation, AI-driven analytics, and customer experience platforms.

We don't sell off-the-shelf products: we build custom solutions, and we treat every client engagement as a real product cycle — with an owner, a budget, a release date, and someone accountable if it goes wrong. AI-assisted engineering is not a side tool at Exelab: it is how we deliver.

The Solution Architect Role

The Solution Architect is that owner.

This is not a role that receives requirements and implements them. It is the person who owns the product: its quality, its budget, its timeline, and the decision to ship. You are a senior engineer who stays hands-on in the codebase, but what you are measured on is the outcome of the product you own — not the volume of code you write.

You work in a duo with a business-side counterpart who owns the solution — the idea and the business outcome it must produce — and holds the day-to-day presence with the client. The product is yours. That split is deliberate: the person accountable for delivery is never the person absorbing client pressure. You are peers, with distinct and explicit accountabilities, and the partnership between you is what makes our engagements work.

What Owning the Product Means Here

• You are in from the estimate. You are involved before the deal is closed, because you will be held to the number. You do not inherit a budget somebody else committed to.

• You own budget and timeline. A Project Manager monitors and escalates; they do not govern them for you. You do.

• You press the red button. Production release is approved by whoever answers for the product. That's you.

• You never work to requirements. If a build satisfies every requirement and delivers no value, that is a conversation you are part of — not one you sit out because "the spec said so".

• You lead the extended team. Specialists (HubSpot, additional devs) plug in on demand; you decide when and how. On larger engagements you are the primary builder inside a broader team.

Key Responsibilities

• Product ownership — full accountability for quality, budget, timeline, and release of one or more projects in parallel

• Estimation and scoping — size the work you will be held to, and defend the trade-offs behind the number

• Technical design — turn business goals into a well-architected solution, balancing time-to-value, scalability, and maintainability

• Hands-on engineering — build full stack applications across NodeJS, Python, React/TypeScript, and AWS, staying close to the code

• AI-assisted engineering leadership — be a power user of modern AI coding tools and agentic workflows, and help the team adopt them

• Engineering standards — set and uphold standards on testing, CI/CD, observability, and IaC (AWS CDK)

• Team orchestration — direct specialists and developers, in continuous dialogue with the counterpart who owns the solution, the PM, and the QA/Trainer

Requirements

Experience

• 7+ years in software development, at least 2 owning delivery end-to-end

• Demonstrable product ownership: you have been the person answering for scope, quality, budget and release date on real projects — not just for the code

Product judgment

• Ability to make and defend scope trade-offs: what ships now, what is cut, what is deliberate debt

• Comfort saying "this is ready" and "this is not ready", and being accountable for the call

• Instinct for value over completeness — shipping the 70% that moves the client, instead of the 100% that arrives late

Core technical stack

Our stack is polyglot by design: NodeJS and Python are both first-class backend languages. Python in particular plays a central role across data integrations, automations, and AI/ML workflows.

• NodeJS and its main backend frameworks

• Python as a first-class backend language — for APIs, data processing, automations, and AI/ML workloads

• React and TypeScript for modern frontend development

• AWS, including IaC with AWS CDK

• Relational and non-relational databases (e.g. MySQL, DynamoDB)

• RESTful APIs and third-party integrations

• Git and modern development workflows

AI-assisted engineering

• Demonstrated proficiency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and similar) and agentic workflows

• Ability to evaluate, guide, and improve AI-generated code — and to bring others along the same curve

• Evaluated as a core technical skill during the interview process

Soft skills

• Excellent communication, technical and client-facing

• Comfortable with being the single point of accountability for the product

• Bias toward action, shipped outcomes, pragmatic trade-offs

• Italian language proficiency is mandatory; good command of English, written and spoken

Nice to Have (strongly preferred: consulting or professional-services background)

• Consulting or professional-services experience: delivering for external clients, under commercial constraints, with someone else's money and deadlines on the line

• Experience as tech lead or product owner on a commercial software product

• Startup experience, especially with direct responsibility for what shipped

• High-coverage automated testing experience

• AWS or Azure certifications

• CRM, ERP, or e-commerce integration projects

• Serverless architecture and microservices

• AI and data systems experience

Ideal Profile

"7+ years in software development with real end-to-end delivery ownership; answers for scope, quality, budget and release date, from the estimate to the decision to ship; strong product judgment — trade-offs, readiness calls, value over completeness; fluent in NodeJS, Python, React/TypeScript, and AWS with CDK; advanced practitioner of AI-assisted engineering; thrives as a peer alongside a business-side counterpart, with distinct and explicit accountabilities."

Salary range:  40-50 K