Solutions Architect 3 - AI - Digital Architecture

Position Overview

Seeking a Solutions Architect 3 / Principal Digital Architect to lead architecture for complex AI-related projects. The architect will own end-to-end solution and platform architecture, balancing scalability, performance, security, resilience, and cost while translating ambiguous business requirements into durable technical solutions.

This role requires daily communication with U.S.-based business owners, product leaders, engineering teams, and architecture stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and define end-to-end solution and platform architectures for large-scale distributed systems from concept through production.
• Design solutions for scalability, performance, resilience, security, and reliability.
• Partner with business leaders, product owners, engineering managers, and delivery teams to align architecture with business outcomes.
• Evaluate and introduce emerging technologies through proofs of concept and architectural spikes.
• Establish and enforce architecture standards, patterns, and best practices.
• Provide technical leadership, architectural guidance, and mentorship to engineering teams.
• Ensure solutions meet security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.
• Create and maintain architecture documentation, including design rationale and trade-offs.
• Continuously improve architecture to increase developer productivity, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Influence technical decisions without direct authority.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree with 5+ years of experience in an architecture capacity.
• Strong architectural thinking with the ability to decompose complex problems and evaluate trade-offs.
• Strong technical leadership and ability to influence teams without authority.
• Excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong requirements analysis and ability to translate business/non-functional requirements into technical designs.
• Strong foundation in application and platform architecture using modern architectural patterns and standards.

Preferred Technical Skills

AI & Architecture

• Experience defining AI reference architectures and enterprise AI standards.
• Experience comparing classical ML, LLM-based, and non-AI solutions based on business requirements.
• Experience taking AI solutions from POC to production at scale.
• Hands-on RAG architecture experience, including:
  • Data ingestion
  • Document preprocessing
  • Chunking strategies
  • Embeddings and vectorization
  • Query-time retrieval and ranking
  • Context assembly
• Understanding of vector databases, similarity search, embedding techniques, and related performance/cost trade-offs.
• Experience with Agentic AI frameworks and end-to-end AI workflows.
• Knowledge of:
  • Prompt design and versioning
  • Context management and memory
  • Model routing and fallback strategies
  • Model selection
  • Fine-tuning vs. RAG vs. hybrid approaches
  • AI evaluation and monitoring
  • Drift detection
  • Guardrails and AI security
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into enterprise platforms through APIs and event-driven architectures.

Programming & Distributed Systems

• Strong programming background in Python and Java.
• Experience designing enterprise-scale distributed systems.
• Ability to reason about solutions at the code level.

Cloud & DevOps

• AWS and cloud-native architecture.
• Docker and Kubernetes.
• CI/CD
• Infrastructure as Code
• Observability
• Automated testing

Data Architecture

• SQL and NoSQL databases
• Snowflake
• Data modeling
• Data warehouses
• Replication and sharding

API Architecture

• Strong REST, GraphQL, and/or gRPC API design.
• API versioning and documentation.
• Experience integrating distributed services through APIs and event-driven architectures.

AI Non-Functional Requirements

The candidate should understand how to architect AI systems for:

• Performance and latency optimization
• Cost control and token efficiency
• Security and data privacy
• AI guardrails
• Scalability and reliability
• Production monitoring and evaluation

Team & Work Environment

• Team size: 18 members
• 100% remote for candidates residing in the U.S.
• Chicago or Peoria candidates are preferred.
• The role involves significant collaboration with U.S.-based business owners and architecture teams.