Architect Jobs in San Mateo, CA

About Sol

Sol is an agentic HR system built for how work is changing. We're replacing the traditional HRIS with an AI-native foundation. We are built for change, designed to scale, and reimagined with AI from the ground up, so HR leaders get a clear view of their workforce instead of a system everyone works around.

Sol was founded by leaders who spent decades building the modern HR category, and is backed by Sutter Hill Ventures and NEA. Our first customers go live in early 2027 and we need you to make them wildly successful.

The Role

Most HR systems treat payroll as an endpoint. At Sol, it's key to how the full picture of employment comes together. Compensation, time off, leave, equity, benefits - today those live in disconnected systems without connective tissue. Sol is built to hold all of it. Getting payroll right means earning employee trust.

We're hiring a Product Architect, Payroll to own how Sol thinks about, models, and executes pay. The right person has been a product manager at a payroll company or a payroll administrator with deep product knowledge. They know the domain at depth: multi-state complexity, garnishment sequencing, equity treatment, off-cycle edge cases, the compliance landmines that have humbled better engineers than them. They're proud of that knowledge. And they're probably ready to do something with it that their current system won't let them.

One of Sol's core values is imagination - the conviction that payroll doesn't have to work the way it always has. AI and new technologies are opening up design possibilities that weren't available before. We're looking for someone who can hold deep payroll expertise and still ask "why does it work this way?" and genuinely mean it.

At Sol, this role owns the payroll domain and shapes how it's built. That means defining the data model, the compliance architecture, and how payroll connects to every other employment event across a worker's lifecycle - compensation changes, leave, time off, equity vesting, benefits deductions. You're not inheriting an engine. You're designing one, in close partnership with engineering and informed by real customer complexity from day one.

What You'll Do

• Own the payroll domain at Sol - be the person in the room who knows how pay actually works and what breaks when it doesn't

• Write payroll product specs that translate real-world complexity - multi-state, garnishments, equity treatment, off-cycle runs, benefits deductions - into requirements engineering can build against

• Partner with engineering on payroll architecture decisions - you're not handing off requirements, you're co-designing

• Work directly with design partners to pressure-test payroll assumptions against real customer complexity before anything ships

• Stay ahead of the compliance landscape and translate regulatory requirements into product constraints, not afterthoughts

• Roll up your sleeves on early customer work while the payroll engine matures - and bring back what you learn

What We're Looking For

• You've been a product manager with payroll as your primary domain at a company where payroll was core

• You understand payroll complexity at the detail level: multi-state, garnishments, equity treatment, benefits deductions, off-cycle runs, multi-worker-type variation

• You can hold the compliance dimension without outsourcing it - you know when something is a product decision and when it's a regulatory constraint

• You think in data models and systems, not just features - you care about what belongs at the platform level vs. what belongs in configuration

• You write structured product specs that engineering can build against, not just PRDs that document what already exists

• You're comfortable in early-stage ambiguity - there's no existing payroll codebase to maintain or inherit. You're here to define it.

• You're genuinely excited about what AI and new technologies can enable in payroll - faster compliance, smarter modeling, real-time visibility - and you want to help build that future, not just observe it

Bonus if you have:

• Exposure to payroll-adjacent domains: benefits administration, equity management, or time and attendance

• Experience with non-US payroll (we're US-first, but thinking globally early matters)

• A technical background that helps you reason about calculation engines, compliance rules, and configuration boundaries

Why Now

Payroll is the most compliance-critical, trust-sensitive domain in HR - and it's been too long since someone reimagined the space. Most payroll systems today are calculation engines built decades ago, patched for compliance, and bolted awkwardly onto everything else.

Sol is building an AI-native HRIS from scratch. Payroll is a core domain, not a bolt-on, not a future integration, not something we'll get to eventually. This role exists to make sure we get the foundation right before we build on top of it.

You'd join early enough to define that foundation. The data model, the compliance architecture, the way payroll connects to every employment event across a worker's lifecycle - that's yours to design. Few roles at a company this early offer domain work this deep.

Sol is an equal opportunity employer. We don't discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local law. We're committed to building an inclusive workplace and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.