Solutions Architect

London (hybrid), with international travel · Reports to the CEO

About Lua

Lua is the Agent OS. We build digital employees — agents that do a real job end to end: they read a company’s own systems, make the decision, take the action, and get a little better every time they run. Not chatbots that answer questions — digital workers that do the work, on the company’s own data and workflows, with everything they build owned by the business. Teams write their logic on Lua (agents, skills, tools, jobs, webhooks, guardrails) and we run the hard parts underneath: infrastructure, multi-provider model orchestration, data, channels (WhatsApp, Slack, Email, Instagram, Messenger, a voice-capable website widget, HTTP API) and monitoring.

Our customers are the companies that run their markets across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia — heritage-site operators, travel and hospitality groups, national supermarket chains, listed conglomerates, regional banks, social-commerce companies and insurers. Together they employ tens of thousands of people and turn over billions a year, and they all want the same thing: to be AI-native on the systems they already run, with nothing to rip out. Backed by Y Combinator, we’ve raised $5.8M. We’re a team of around 15, there’s almost no delivery process yet, and this is a chance to build the playbook, not inherit one.

The role

This is not a role about scaling a services team in step with the customer count. It’s the opposite. You own Lua’s productized solutions — the repeatable vertical patterns that let a three-week go-live become the template the next customer inherits at near-zero marginal cost. Every engagement either draws from an existing solution or becomes one. Your job is to make the second, third and tenth deployment of a pattern nearly free — through reusable templates, automation, and a lean team of developers you build and lead. Success is measured by how little it costs to say yes to the next customer, not how many people you hired to do it.

You own the full arc: the solution design at the point of sale, the project management that gets it live on time, the senior client relationship that renews it, and the loop that feeds what we learn back into the product.

To be clear about scope: this is not a CTO role — our CTO and co-founder owns the platform and product architecture. You’re building the solutions and delivery machine on top of the platform: how we design, ship, and productize agentic customer solutions.

What you’ll own

• Pitch technical solutions to clients’ C-suites. Sit across from C-level executives at large enterprises across Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Europe and the US. Translate their problem into a solution, and win the technical decision. Chair the steering and governance meetings, keep customer leadership confident, and be the person they trust to make it right when something goes wrong.
• Own the solution catalogue. Define, build and maintain Lua’s productized verticals. Decide what gets templatized and what stays bespoke, and drive the share of every new deployment served by existing solutions upward over time.
• Own solution design, sale to ship. Lead solutions architecture end to end: the design a customer buys is the design they get. Close the sold-≠-deliverable gap by owning both sides of it, not coordinating across them.
• Drive marginal cost to near-zero. Build the delivery model — reusable templates, automation, and Lua agents that do onboarding, configuration, testing and monitoring — so each additional customer, entity or market costs a fraction of the last.
• Hire, manage and QC a team of developers. Recruit junior developers, both in-house and outsourced, quality check their work personally, hold them to a quality bar, and build them into a high-performing unit. This is hands-on: you own the quality of what ships, not a hand-off to project managers.
• Run tight project management across simultaneous go-lives. Run multiple client implementations in parallel as governed programs — scope, plan, dependencies, risks — and hit the go-live dates without any of them drifting.
• Own customer outcomes. Own each engagement from signature to a live, adopted, renewing system across every market, and own post-launch health: adoption, expansion and renewal.
• Centralise vs. localise. Set solution and delivery standards centrally while allowing appropriate local and regional adaptation, across differing data-residency and regulatory requirements per market.
• Feed the product. Capture what the field learns and route it back — new solution patterns, platform primitives, and the agents that make the next deployment cheaper still.

The KPIs you’ll own

• Repeatability / marginal cost. Share of each new deployment served by existing solutions, and the marginal cost — in people and time — of the next customer, entity or market.
• Time-to-value. Days from kickoff to a first acknowledged business outcome — and how fast that number falls as the catalogue matures.
• On-time delivery. Go-lives and milestones hit to plan across concurrent engagements.
• Gross retention / CSAT. Customers renewing, expanding, and telling you the outcome was real.
• Automation ratio. Share of implementation work done by Lua agents rather than people — trending up.
• Delivery health (guardrails). Margin and quality kept healthy; rework / escalation rate falling as solutions harden.

What we’re looking for

We need someone who thinks like a product leader and can both architect solutions and run a delivery team. You’ve delivered complex technical systems in the real world, but your instinct when you see the same work twice is to build the thing that removes it, not to staff it. You’re energised by a scrappy, seed-stage environment where priorities shift, there’s no playbook to inherit, and the job is building structure from chaos while shipping live systems.

Must-haves

• Productization instinct. You’ve turned bespoke work into repeatable patterns and can point to the marginal cost you drove down, not just the volume you shipped. You reach for leverage before headcount: templates, automation, and — at an Agent OS company — agents that do the work.
• Technical pitching to executives. You’re as comfortable pitching a technical solution to a customer’s C-suite as reviewing a junior engineer’s code. You can chair a room of C-level executives and leave them more confident than they walked in, and front the hard conversation when something goes wrong.
• Hands-on team leadership. You’ve hired, managed and developed developers — reviewing their work and holding them to a quality bar yourself, not delegating quality to someone else. You’re energised to build a team and stay close to the work.
• Delivery and project management. You’ve owned delivery outcomes and their KPIs — time-to-value, retention, quality, on-time go-lives — running multiple engagements at once, and you’ve led the recovery of at-risk deployments.
• Solution architecture judgment. You can design, assess and challenge a solution architecture, and you understand production operations: reliability, observability, governance, data isolation. (You won’t own platform architecture — that’s the CTO — but you must be credible on it.)
• Multi-market experience. You’ve operated across multiple countries or regions, across differing data-residency and regulatory requirements — not single-geography — and have sound judgement on what to centralise vs. let local teams adapt.
• 10+ years across technical delivery, professional services, solutions or implementation, including building and scaling teams, processes and playbooks, and owning senior client relationships.
• Start-up experience. You’ve created playbooks from scratch.
• Available to travel internationally to meet customers in person.

Nice-to-haves

• You’ve delivered AI / LLM / agent systems in production, including evals and governance of non-deterministic systems.
• You’ve built delivery or solutions for a developer-first or technical product.
• Formal delivery credentials (PMP, PRINCE2, MSP or similar) — welcome, not required.