Solution Architect

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. The Solution Architect owns the product: its quality, budget, timeline, and the decision to ship. The role is a senior engineer who stays hands-on in the codebase and is measured on the outcome of the product rather than the volume of code written. The Solution Architect works in a duo with a business-side counterpart who owns the solution and holds the day-to-day presence with the client. Specialists (HubSpot, additional developers) plug in on demand, and the Solution Architect decides when and how.

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; 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 business-side counterpart, the PM, and the QA/Trainer; Approve production releases as the person answering for the product

Requirements

7+ years in software development, at least 2 owning delivery end-to-end; Demonstrable product ownership: answering for scope, quality, budget and release date on real projects; Ability to make and defend scope trade-offs; Comfort saying 'this is ready' and 'this is not ready' and being accountable for the call; Instinct for value over completeness; Proficiency in 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 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; Demonstrated proficiency with AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, and similar) and agentic workflows; Ability to evaluate, guide, and improve AI-generated code; Excellent technical and client-facing communication; Comfortable 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; Right to work in Italy and be based in the country for this role

Nice to have

Consulting or professional-services experience; 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