Solutions Architect 3 - AI - Digital Architecture

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., * 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., 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.

• 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 AES Group is a premier technology and engineering consulting company that has been bringing businesses and talent together for over 20 years to deliver innovative solutions that have the greatest positive impact on society. AES has helped over 40 business enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, engage their customers, empower their employees, and transform their business operations with the power of cloud, data, AI, engineering, and other emerging technologies.