Principal ERPNext Solutions Architect

This is a senior individual contributor (IC) role, reporting directly to the CEO, responsible for defining and governing the architectural direction of all Frappe/ERPNext implementations across the organization.

We use ERPNext as a business operating system with its modules such as accounting, HRMS, CRM, PMS, and helpdesk. We also use ERPNext in some SaaS projects for invoicing and subscription management. We use Frappe sometimes standalone to power up an independent business process, microservice, or something that people would typically use FastAPI or Flask for.

You will act as the highest authority when it comes to translating real-life business cases and user stories on Frappe/ERPNext-based projects into scalable, reusable, and upgradeable solutions. You will have final architectural authority on Frappe/ERPNext decisions across our 20-person Frappe engineering team, including Frappe project and engineering managers.

You will work closely with internal stakeholders, clients, and engineering teams to ensure clean system design, strong governance, and long-term maintainability.

This role also involves contributing to the Frappe ecosystem through upstream contributions, public apps, and thought leadership, ensuring that solutions extend beyond one-off implementations into reusable, productized assets.

Responsibilities

1. Translate business problems into Frappe/ERPNext well. When a stakeholder (internal or client) describes a pain point, you'll map it to Frappe/ERPNext, efficiently reuse existing features wherever possible, customizing only when justified, and isolating customizations into apps so we don't get stuck on old versions.
2. Push back on bad customization. Often the right answer is to change the process, not the software. You'll consult clients and internal teams, show them better alternatives, and advocate for process changes that reduce customization debt. You should be comfortable telling a stakeholder "you don't need this customization" and making them thank you for it.
3. Set presales expectations correctly. You'll be in presales conversations promising the moon and then making sure we land the client on the moon. Over-promising and under-delivering are not tradeoffs we want to make; you're the person who keeps both honest.
4. Improve our internal ERPNext. We still run too much on Google Sheets, email, and Slack. You'll proactively spot what should move into ERPNext, build a staging implementation, and chase stakeholders until the switch happens. Nobody will hand you a list of things to fix; you will have to find them.
5. Engage upstream. Frappe doesn't have as many hooks as we'd like. When we monkey-patch, we want it to be temporary. You'll work with the Frappe community and repo maintainers to either land our changes upstream as PRs or make the case for new hooks in core so we can replace patches with clean app extensions.
6. Productize what we build. A project isn't done until something goes back to the community. Every project ships at least one of the following: an upstream PR, a public Frappe app, a documented hook proposal, or a published article on what we learned. The long-term goal is to grow the ERPNext ecosystem so it's credible for large enterprises, and to achieve that, more of the work needs to live as reusable projects/products, not as one-off services.

Must-Haves

1. You've spent at least 5–10 years deep in Frappe/ERPNext, with at least 3 of those years on serious product or platform work, not just configuring ERPNext for small businesses where customization levels are minimal. We'd take three years building a real Frappe product over ten years of light implementation work.
2. You read Python comfortably and have opinions about Frappe internals, hooks, controller overrides, the permission system, background jobs, the desk vs. portal split, custom fields vs. customize form vs. property setter.
3. You must have public GitHub contributions. A lot more than sample apps. You can be a Frappe app maintainer, a significant code contributor, or make design and architectural decisions for a decently complex Frappe app.
4. You must be active in the Frappe forum. Not just asking questions but answering others' questions. Making proposals and suggestions.
5. Real-life experience/stories of releasing something reusable for a client or internal project.

Good to Have

1. Experience building SaaS products powered by Frappe and/or ERPNext
2. Migrating large-scale data from other platforms to Frappe apps such as Xero/QuickBooks to ERPNext Accounting, PipeDrive/Salesforce to Frappe CRM, and ZenDesk/Freshdesk to Frappe Helpdesk.
3. UX design exposure. Either leading a design sprint for a Frappe app or being part of the journey.
4. Documented, trained, onboarded clients on Frappe/ERPNext implementation
5. Handled tens of millions of records across a single Frappe/ERPNext setup with database size approaching 1TB.