AI Solution Architect

Required Skills:

We are looking for a highly motivated and passionate AI Architect. This role will require a skillset across a variety of AI technologies, with a strong emphasis on designing intelligent digital assistants and agent-based solutions using Microsoft Copilot, Azure OpenAI, and other Azure AI services.

This position is responsible for shaping scalable, secure, and compliant AI architectures that support a range of business scenarios-leveraging generative AI, computer vision, LLMOps, and other advanced AI capabilities. The AI Architect collaborates with business leaders, engineering teams, data science, and security to translate business needs into AI-driven solutions that deliver tangible business outcomes and align with enterprise standards.

The architect should have expertise in using AI to increase productivity, efficiency, quality and reduce operational costs in Retail. It's a highly visible role with a broad engagement within IT and business teams as well as externally with technology providers. In this role, he/ she will be responsible for collaborating and driving architecture deliverables with other architects, external experts and consultants. And the individual will often have to learn on their own and remain on the cusp of new technologies in AI.

Job Description:

Responsible for defining and maintaining AI technology roadmap and plans. Identify, communicate, and mitigate risks within the roadmap or implementation plans. Participate in IT 5-year planning and annual budgeting process.

Lead AI Solution Architecture for Digital Assistants and AI Agents.

Create criteria for evaluating, comparing and selecting AI services.

Architect scalable and secure digital assistant and AI agent solutions leveraging Microsoft Copilot Studio, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, and Graph Connectors.

Define architectural patterns for integrating enterprise data sources (e.g., file shares, SQL, APIs) to support retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and intelligent interactions.

Ensure solutions meet performance, accuracy, and governance requirements.

Develop and Govern Enterprise AI Patterns and Best Practices

Create and maintain reusable architecture frameworks, reference implementations, and guardrails for AI use cases across the organization.

Establish guidelines for responsible AI, including transparency, fairness, and privacy.

Champion LLMOps practices to streamline lifecycle management of models and prompts.

Take a leadership role in exploring and analyzing new applications and opportunities in AI in the marketplace, technology and infrastructure services. Prepare ROI analysis and assist with creating budget proposals to initiate the acquisition of new AI services.

Develop an AI governance framework in conjunction with the AI CoE and architecture review board that will enable the organization to consume AI services and reduce risks.

Provide architecture and technology consultancy for portfolio planning.

Partner with product managers, business analysts, engineers, and domain experts to identify high-impact AI opportunities and co-design solutions.

Partner with other architects, security, engineering, legal, and compliance teams to ensure adherence to enterprise policies and regulatory standards.

Support broader AI Initiatives across the enterprise

Provide architecture leadership for AI use cases such as computer vision (e.g., customer experience in stores, store safety and compliance), forecasting models, personalization engines, and process automation.

Design AI solutions that are cloud-native and aligned with modern data and event-driven architectures.

Develop the internal AI Financial Mgmt and Ops practices collaborating with the CoE, Cloud Platform and IT Finance team.

Mentor and Enable the Broader IT Team

Support capability building across IT teams through architectural reviews, hands-on workshops, and training on AI tooling and practices.

Act as an internal advisor and evangelist for AI transformation within the organization.

Ensure completion of Architectural and project deliverables on time and under budget and that anticipated business outcomes are achieved.

Provide architectural and technical input for definition, estimation and delivery of AI projects

Previous Experience should be coming from an Architecture background (documentation, presentation, understanding costs involved [not budgeting but just doing cost research and presenting]).

Working with partners/collaborating with vendors

AI Experience – hands-on experience

Starting from prompt engineering

Configuring AI agents

Rug Pattern – don’t just ask LLM but how are you using them and understanding the patterns, what can LLM do?, etc.

Developing some assistant for legal (understand what legal documents are involved, etc.)

Microsoft technologies experience

Azure Cloud Experience (open to GCP or AWS)

Python Scripting Required