Colin Baird
Product Lead at Poolside | Scale Your Startup Career Strategically
Studied at Boston University Questrom School of Business
Works at Poolside
Available tomorrow
Starting at 10:00 PM UTC
Questions? Start chatting with this coach before you get started.
Colin's Offerings
Custom hourly · $79/hr
Get help with AI Automation, AI Fundamentals, and .
Colin also coaches for Career Coaching, Build with AI, and Product Management. View all.
Colin’s Startup Careers Qualifications
Experience level: Director
I've worked across almost every stage of technology company, from 9-person IT shops to MongoDB and AWS, before leaving Big Tech to join Poolside as employee #47. At Poolside, I experienced the startup journey firsthand: rapid growth, building teams and products from scratch, changing roles as the company evolved, working directly with executives, and ultimately navigating a major strategic transaction and company restructuring. I can help people evaluate startup opportunities beyond the headline salary or company hype: stage and runway, equity and dilution, role scope, founder quality, career upside, compensation, risk, and whether joining actually makes sense for where you want your career to go. I'm particularly useful for people deciding whether to leave a larger company for a startup, comparing multiple offers, negotiating startup compensation, or trying to understand what working at an early-stage company is really like.
Colin can help with:
AI Automation
AI Fundamentals
Competitive Analysis
Interview Prep
Resume Review
Colin also coaches for Career Coaching, Build with AI, and Product Management. View all.
About Colin
I've spent my career at the intersection of technology, customers, and product, from small IT consulting firms to MongoDB, AWS, and most recently Poolside, where I joined as the company's first Solutions Architect and later moved into Product leadership. At Poolside, I helped build the global Solutions Architecture organization from 0 to 7 before identifying an opportunity around sovereign AI, building the first prototype myself, and ultimately leading the resulting product line. Over roughly 14 months, we grew it to ~$3M ARR and 40+ deployments across enterprise, government, and highly regulated environments. I've made several career transitions myself, from IT consulting → Sales Engineering → Solutions Architecture → Product, and I've interviewed extensively across startups and large technology companies. I have an MBA from Boston University and particularly enjoy helping people think through career positioning, technical interviews, compensation, startup opportunities, and how to move between technical, product, and customer-facing roles. I'm also an active builder. Outside of work I've launched my own AI-powered market analytics SaaS and built an open-source agent harness. For anyone looking to understand or build with AI, I'm happy to work hands-on across LLMs, agents, cloud architecture, product strategy, and turning an idea into something real.
Why do I coach?
I've benefited enormously from good managers, mentors, and colleagues throughout my career, and I've always enjoyed paying that forward. Some of the work I've found most rewarding has been helping people prepare for an interview, think through a difficult career decision, learn a new technology, or simply get unstuck on a problem. I also think I've taken a somewhat unconventional path through tech, which gives me a useful perspective. I've worked at tiny companies and AWS, been an individual contributor and built teams, moved between technical and Product roles, joined an early-stage AI startup, and built products of my own. I don't believe there's one correct career path, and I enjoy helping people figure out the one that makes sense for them. Mostly, I coach because I genuinely like helping smart, motivated people make progress.
Work Experience
Product Lead, Sovereign AI & Strategic Partnerships
Poolside
August 2024 - Present
• Founded and led Poolside's sovereign/on-premises AI product line, identifying the market opportunity, building the initial prototype, and scaling the business to ~$3M ARR and 40+ global deployments in ~14 months. • Owned the product end-to-end across strategy, roadmap, customer discovery, engineering prioritization, pricing and packaging, GTM alignment, and enterprise delivery, translating requirements from regulated, defense, and intelligence customers into product capabilities. • Set product direction across backend engineering, applied research, post-training, inference, and Solutions Architecture, prioritizing investments and coordinating execution across teams that did not directly report to me. • Led product strategy for Poolside's $2M In-Q-Tel work program spanning four government agencies, evolving the roadmap based on field feedback from fine-tuning toward agentic software development capabilities including tool use and multi-agent workflows.
Enterprise Solutions Architect
AWS
October 2022 - August 2024
• Co-developed one of NAMER's first reusable RAG demo environments in early 2023, which was subsequently used/adapted by over 225 Amazonians and demonstrated to multiple strategic enterprise customers. • Authored a PR/FAQ in December 2022 conceptualizing a verticalized Enterprise GenAI Assistant, which was shared with senior AWS AI/ML leadership and contributed to early discussions for what later became Amazon Q. • Led a strategic competitive win that resulted in $1.1M ARR migrated from GCP to AWS. • Led and supported numerous 1:many internal and customer-facing enablement sessions. • Served as a mentor to 2 new SA's and 1 SA intern. • Expanded scope from 4 Enterprise customers to 19 by end of tenure.
Senior Solutions Architect
MongoDB
June 2020 - August 2022
As a Solutions Architect at MongoDB I helped advise customers on the design of reliable and scalable systems. Daily activities include: • Designing systems, application architecture, and infrastructure to help drive some of the world's largest software development projects leveraging MongoDB • Advise customers on architectures, patterns, and strategies for making the best use of MongoDB • Align to support sales with activities such as technical discovery, demos, proof of value, presentation, sizing, and documentation of technical decision criteria • Translate technical concepts and patterns into business benefits for management and executives • Confidently articulate the business value of MongoDB solutions
Sales Engineer
SolarWinds
April 2019 - June 2020
Technology solutions engineer focused on pre-sales and solutions architecting. Daily roles include software demonstration, deployment, troubleshooting and architecting across various SolarWinds systems, networking and cloud solutions. Additional capacities include but are not limited to: • Enterprise & Commercial Pre-Sales • Leading & Developing Intra-Organizational Training • Enabling Technology Solutions Spanning: -DevOps & APM Monitoring -Security/SIEM -Auditing & Compliance -Access Rights Management -Patch Management
Education
Boston University Questrom School of Business
MBA, Business
2020 - 2022