Head of Strategic Accounts, Solutions Architecture

About this role

Who We Are About Stripe Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world’s largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. Our mission is to increase the GDP of the internet, and we have a staggering amount of work ahead. That means you have an unprecedented opportunity to put the global economy within everyone’s reach while doing the most important work of your career. About the Team The Solutions Architecture team partners with Stripe’s users to design and build transformative solutions that unlock growth, modernize business models, and shape the future of commerce. We work with executives, product leaders, and engineering teams at the world’s largest and most innovative companies, helping them translate ambitious strategies into scalable solutions on Stripe. Strategic Accounts Solutions Architecture serves Stripe’s most complex and consequential users. The team combines deep technical expertise, commercial judgment, and customer empathy to solve problems that often have no established playbook. Its work not only helps individual users grow; it also surfaces emerging needs and opportunities that can inform Stripe’s product strategy and create value for users at global scale. These Solution Architects are deeply embedded in these users and are working along as their technical co-founders. The Head of Strategic Accounts, Solutions Architecture will lead a team of senior architects who are trusted partners to strategic, key, and major accounts. This leader will set the vision for the team, develop exceptional technical talent, and work closely with account leadership to deepen and grow Stripe’s most important relationships. They will also build a strong partnership with Product and Engineering, turning insights from leading-edge customer engagements into the next wave of innovation across Stripe. This is a highly technical, hands-on leadership role. The successful candidate will be comfortable moving between executive conversations, account strategy, architecture reviews, product discussions, and direct support for the team’s most complex engagements. They will be AI-enabled in how they lead and operate, highly curious about new technologies and business models, and committed to helping their team and Stripe continuously raise the bar. What You’ll Do Responsibilities • Set the vision, strategy, and operating model for Strategic Accounts Solutions Architecture, aligning the team’s priorities with Stripe’s user, product, and business objectives. • Recruit, lead, coach, and retain a world-class team of senior Solutions Architects supporting Stripe’s strategic, key, and major accounts. • Partner with account leaders to develop and execute technical account strategies that deepen customer relationships, unlock new use cases, and drive durable growth. • Lead from the front in the team’s most complex and high-impact engagements, including architecture workshops, executive briefings, solution design, technical evaluations, and critical escalations. • Serve as a trusted technical advisor to senior executives, product leaders, and engineering leaders at the world’s largest and most innovative companies. • Build a close, durable partnership with Stripe Product and Engineering teams; synthesize patterns from strategic accounts, influence product priorities, and help translate customer needs into scalable capabilities for all Stripe users. • Create mechanisms for senior architects to share technical insights, reusable patterns, and field learnings across Stripe. • Establish a culture of technical excellence, curiosity, accountability, experimentation, and continuous learning. • Champion AI-enabled ways of working across the team, using AI to improve insight generation, solution development, team productivity, and the quality and speed of customer outcomes. • Develop talent through clear expectations, thoughtful coaching, meaningful feedback, and opportunities for architects to expand their technical, commercial, and leadership impact. • Collaborate closely with Sales, Customer Success, Professional Services, Technical Account Management, Partnerships, Marketing, Product, and Engineering to deliver cohesive outcomes for users. • Build processes and metrics that measure the team’s impact on customer outcomes, account growth, product influence, and organizational effectiveness. • Anticipate changes in technology, customer needs, competitive dynamics, and industry structure, and translate those signals into action for the team and Stripe. • Represent Stripe in executive forums, customer business reviews, industry events, and other strategic engagements. Minimum Requirements • 6+ years of experience leading technical pre-sales, solutions architecture, sales engineering, or comparable customer-facing architecture teams aligned to strategic, key, or major accounts. • A track record of hiring, developing, and leading senior technical talent in a complex, high-growth environment. • Deep technical fluency and the ability to remain hands-on—quickly understanding architectures, APIs, data flows, integration patterns, security and reliability considerations, and emerging technologies. • Experience partnering directly with senior customer executives, product leaders, and engineering leaders on complex, business-critical initiatives. • Demonstrated success connecting technical strategy to account growth, customer outcomes, and long-term partnerships. • Strong experience partnering with Product and Engineering teams to influence roadmaps, shape requirements, and turn customer insights into scalable product innovation. • An AI-enabled approach to leadership and problem-solving, with practical experience using AI tools to increase the quality, speed, or scale of work. • Exceptional curiosity and learning agility, including a strong desire to explore new technologies, business models, and ways of working. • Strong executive presence and communication skills, with the ability to make complex technical and business topics clear to audiences at every level. • Sound judgment and the ability to lead through ambiguity, balance competing priorities, and make high-quality decisions in fast-moving environments. • A collaborative leadership style and a demonstrated ability to align stakeholders across Sales, Product, Engineering, and other cross-functional teams. • Willingness to travel as needed to engage with strategic customers and collaborate with internal teams. Preferred Qualifications • Experience with payments, financial infrastructure, fintech space