Senior Solution Architect - Personalization Strategist

Contentful GmbH

Chicago, IL

JOB DETAILS
SALARY
$140,000–$190,000 Per Year
SKILLS
Adobe Product Family, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Application Programming Interface (API), Architectural Services, Best Practices, Caching, Cloud Architecture, Code Reviews, Communication Skills, Consulting, Content Delivery/Distribution, Content Management Systems (CMS), Cross-Functional, Customer Relations, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems, Customer/Consumer Behavior, Data Quality, Documentation, Ecosystems, GCP (Good Clinical Practices), GraphQL, Instrumentation, Internet Technology, JavaScript, Leadership, Logic Design, Machine Tool, Mentoring, Microservices, Microsoft Windows Azure, Performance Tuning/Optimization, Privacy Controls, Product Development, Product Engineering, Product Marketing, Production Support, Professional Services, Proof of Concept, REST (Representational State Transfer), React.js, Regulations, Risk Management, Sales Support, Salesforce.com, Software Testing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Solution Sales, Team Player, Technical Leadership, Technical Support, Technical Writing, Technical/Engineering Design, Use Cases, User Interface/Experience (UI/UX), Vue.js, Writing Skills
LOCATION
Chicago, IL
POSTED
30+ days ago

About the Opportunity

We are hiring a 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 deployment • Tradeoffs between targeting precision, latency, and operational complexity • Define measurement approaches that connect: • User behavior decisioning logic exposure business outcomes

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:

• CDPs (Segment, Tealium, mParticle, etc.) • CRMs (Salesforce, Dynamics) • Analytics platforms (GA4, Adobe Analytics, Snowplow) • Identity, consent, and privacy tooling

Design personalization delivery patterns across modern rendering strategies:

• SSR, CSR, SSG, ISR • Redge 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

Required:

Personalization & Experimentation Domain Expertise

• 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

Technical & Architectural Skills

• Advanced proficiency with modern web technologies: • JavaScript / TypeScript • React with Next.js (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)

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.

Whats 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 • Value on 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.

Illinois Salary Statement:

The salary range displayed is specifically for those potential hires who will work or reside in the state of Illinois if selected for the role. Any offered salary is determined based on internal equity, internal salary ranges, market data/ranges, applicants skills and prior relevant experience, certain degrees and certifications (e.g., JD/technology), for example.

Illinois Salary Range: $140,000 - $190,000 (80/20 split)

[This position is eligible for equity awards, annual bonuses, short- and long-term incentives, and program-specific awards, where applicable, in accordance with the terms of Contentful's variable compensation plans.]

About the Company

C

Contentful GmbH