COSS Solutions Manager

Job Description: COSS Solutions Manager 

Organisation: COSS (Centre for Open Societal Systems), IIIT-Bangalore

Reports to: GTM Lead

Location: Bengaluru (hybrid) | travel for conferences and country engagement as pipeline develops

The opportunity

COSS manages a portfolio of open-source Digital Public Goods used across agriculture, education, and capacity building — deployed at national scale in government systems across multiple countries. We are now building the global go-to-market engine to take this to new markets. Getting a government to adopt a DPG is not a simple sale. It involves a long technical evaluation — ministries want to understand exactly how the platform works, how it would fit their existing systems, what a deployment would look like end-to-end, and who would implement it. They ask hard questions, and they need to see it working before they commit.

The Solutions Manager exists to answer those questions. This is an individual contributor role at the technical heart of the GTM function — part pre-sales engineer, part product translator, part implementation strategist. You will own the demonstration environment, build the storyboards that make the technology legible to governments, support country engagement with technical depth, and give SI partners what they need to implement confidently. You will be the person in the room — or on the call — when the conversation gets technical.

What you'll do

Solutioning and pre-sales support

• Lead solutioning conversations with government counterparts and donors: understand their context, map it to platform capabilities, and articulate what a real deployment would require
• Support regional GTM leads on active country conversations — join calls, respond to technical questions, and help structure the path from interest to commitment
• Prepare country-specific solution architectures: what gets deployed, in what sequence, using which components, and how it integrates with existing government systems
• Contribute to donor funding proposals: technical sections, capability matrices, and implementation approach documentation
• Conduct hardware sizing and cost assessment to enable the solutioning for the adopters

Demonstrations and sandbox management

• Own and maintain live demonstration environments across the COSS DPG portfolio — up to date, stable, and ready to show at short notice
• Run live product demonstrations for government audiences, ministry officials, and donor representatives — including remote and in-country sessions
• Customise demo flows for specific country contexts: adjust language, use case framing, and data to reflect the audience's own system and priorities
• Prepare demo scripts and walkthroughs that regional GTM leads can use independently when needed

Technical content and lifecycle storyboards

• Build and maintain a library of lifecycle storyboards: visual, end-to-end representations of how each platform gets set up, configured, and used across a real government deployment
• Translate technical platform documentation into accessible formats for government and donor audiences — explainers, capability summaries, integration overviews
• Develop reusable technical assets that feed into GTM collateral: architecture diagrams, deployment checklists, integration FAQs
• Keep technical content current as platforms evolve — coordinate with the product and engineering side to track changes

Partner technical enablement

• Support the onboarding of new implementation partners: walk through platform architecture, share technical documentation, and clarify integration requirements
• Run technical orientation sessions for SI partners entering a new country or platform — ensuring they can begin implementations independently
• Be a reference point for partners with technical questions during active engagements
• Feed implementation learnings back to the GTM team: what partners struggle with, where documentation is thin, and what would make deployments faster

What we're looking for

Must have

• 5+ years of experience in a technical role with a meaningful implementation or pre-sales dimension — enterprise software, development sector platforms, or government systems
• Ability to understand platform architecture and explain it clearly to a non-technical government audience without oversimplifying
• Hands-on experience setting up and running software demonstrations — including customising demo environments and presenting live to decision-makers
• Comfort with technical documentation: able to read an API spec, write a capability summary, and produce a clear architecture overview
• Experience working on or alongside large-scale digital implementations — ideally in a government, public sector, or international development context
• Strong verbal and technical communication and presence in meetings — able to handle technical Q&A from senior ministry officials without losing the room

Good to have

• Familiarity with the DPG or DPI ecosystem (MOSIP, DHIS2, DIGIT, Sunbird, OpenG2P, beckn or similar open-source platforms)
• Experience with government-facing organisations or B2G contexts
• Prior exposure to education technology, agricultural systems, or capacity building platforms
• Background in implementation consulting, system integration, or solution architecture

Why join

The DPG ecosystem has a real gap between platforms that work at scale and governments that know how to evaluate and adopt them. This role is the bridge. You will work across multiple platforms, multiple countries, and multiple stages of a government's decision process — translating complex technology into real adoption. It is technically substantive, externally facing, and directly tied to outcomes that matter.

How we'll measure success (first 12 months)

• Demo environment maintained and active: stable, current, and used in live government demonstrations across at least two pipeline countries
• Country solutioning coverage: technical inputs delivered for every active pipeline opportunity at evaluation stage — no conversation stalls for lack of a technical answer
• Lifecycle storyboard library built: end-to-end storyboards complete for each platform in the active GTM portfolio and in use in government conversations
• Partner technical enablement running: SI partners oriented and independently capable of beginning implementations without hand-holding
• Due diligence quality: government and donor technical queries answered accurately and on time, with clear documentation that travels beyond the initial respons