Solutions Architect, Southeast Asia

Zilliz is a fast-growing startup developing the industry’s leading vector database for enterprise-grade AI. Founded by the engineers behind Milvus, the world’s most popular open-source vector database, the company builds next-generation database technologies to help organizations quickly create AI applications. On a mission to democratize AI, Zilliz is committed to simplifying data management for AI applications and making vector databases accessible to every organization.

Position Summary As a Solutions Architect at Zilliz, you'll help AI startups and digital-native enterprises design, validate, and operate production retrieval systems on Zilliz Cloud (fully-managed Milvus). Working with engineering leaders and hands-on builders, you'll turn product goals into data models, search architectures, benchmarks, and deployment plans across RAG, hybrid and multimodal search, recommender systems, agent memory, and semantic analytics workloads. This is a deeply technical, customer-facing role. The strongest candidates move comfortably between a whiteboard and a profiler: they understand how schema, vector dimension, filter predicates, and indexes could affect latency, recall, throughput, reliability, and cost, as well as explain those tradeoffs to engineers and business leaders alike.

Drive technical sales engagements: Partner with Account Executives to understand customer requirements, identify technical opportunities, and develop solution strategies that support customer adoption and business growth. Design scalable solutions: Architect solutions using Milvus and Zilliz Cloud, addressing data modeling, indexing, search quality, performance, reliability, scalability, and cost. Lead POCs and technical evaluations: Own technical discovery, solution demonstrations, benchmarks, and proof-of-concept engagements with clear success criteria and measurable outcomes. Support production adoption: Guide customers through deployment planning, performance optimization, troubleshooting, and architectural decisions as they move from evaluation to production. Build trusted technical relationships: Engage with developers, architects, engineering leaders, and technical decision-makers, translating complex technical concepts into clear recommendations and business value. Collaborate across teams: Work closely with Engineering and Product to resolve complex customer challenges, share market feedback, and influence product improvements. Scale technical knowledge: Develop reusable demos, reference architectures, best practices, and technical enablement materials to support customers and internal teams across Southeast Asia.

5+ years of experience in Solutions Architecture, Sales Engineering, Customer Engineering, or a comparable technical customer-facing role. Strong foundation in distributed systems, databases, and cloud-native architectures, with the ability to understand and troubleshoot complex production environments. Hands-on technical ability, including working with APIs, writing code or scripts, analyzing logs and metrics, and conducting performance benchmarks. Experience translating customer requirements into practical technical solutions while balancing performance, reliability, complexity, and cost. Proven ability to lead technical evaluations or POCs, navigate technical objections, and influence customer decisions. Strong communication and presentation skills, with the ability to engage both engineering teams and senior technical or business stakeholders. High ownership, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to work independently in a fast-paced, cross-functional environment. Strong English communication skills and willingness to travel within Southeast Asia as business needs require.

Experience with vector databases, distributed databases, search technologies, or large-scale data platforms. Familiarity with RAG, embeddings, AI agents, semantic search, or modern AI/ML application architectures. Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, or cloud-native infrastructure. Experience supporting enterprise customers or AI-native startups across Southeast Asia. Proficiency in an additional Southeast Asian language.

Customer outcomes first: We start with the customer's real needs and constraints, then recommend practical architectures that can scale. Technical depth and sound judgment: We value hands-on problem-solving, evidence-based decisions, and clear reasoning over buzzwords. Move fast and keep learning: We stay curious, use modern tools including AI, and aren't afraid to dive into code to solve problems. One team, end-to-end ownership: We collaborate across Sales, Engineering, and Product, share what we learn, and take responsibility for customer outcomes.