Senior Manager, AI Architect

What you will be doing

As a Senior Manager and AI Architect, you will own and lead the architecture of complex AI programmes end-to-end — from shaping the opportunity and winning the work, through solution design, delivery governance and team leadership. You will bring SME-level depth in enterprise AI architecture and apply it to create real, lasting value for our clients.

Although we do not expect you to be an expert in every technology listed below simultaneously, our team consists of people who can advise clients as well as bring deep technical knowledge when needed. Key responsibilities span the following areas.

Engagement & delivery leadership

• Own and lead the architecture of complex AI and data transformation engagements, taking accountability for solution design, quality, technical risk and client outcomes.
• Lead and resource multi-disciplinary delivery teams — architects, engineers, data scientists and consultants — providing clear direction, technical oversight and people development.
• Manage engagement resourcing: forecast team requirements, work with practice leadership to staff engagements, and develop the talent pipeline through mentoring of junior practitioners.
• Proactively identify and manage delivery and architectural risks in complex stakeholder environments, escalating appropriately and maintaining client confidence throughout.
• Communicate clearly to both technical teams and senior client stakeholders, translating architectural complexity into actionable insight and decisive recommendation.
• Conduct rigorous architecture and design reviews and uphold engineering standards across every engagement you lead.

Stakeholder management & advisory

• Act as a trusted advisor to client architects, CTOs, CDAOs and engineering leads, earning trust through depth of knowledge and a demonstrable delivery track record.
• Build and maintain strong, senior client relationships, navigating competing priorities across business, technology and risk functions.
• Facilitate architecture workshops and decision forums, driving alignment across diverse stakeholder groups and securing buy-in for target-state designs.
• Translate business strategy into architectural roadmaps, sequencing investment and change in a way that balances ambition with deliverability.

Business development & bid support

• Play a leading role in business development: identifying new opportunities, shaping propositions, and supporting or leading bids and tender responses for AI and technology engagements.
• Contribute to proposal writing, articulating our capabilities and differentiators, including authoring technical and architecture sections of bid responses to client tenders and RFPs.
• Support practice-level growth initiatives, including account planning, capability development, and go-to-market positioning for AI architecture and solutions engineering services.

Technical architecture — what you will design

You will be the design authority for enterprise AI platforms, able to reason across the full stack and make credible technology selections. We expect expert-level depth in several of the areas below and working knowledge across the rest.

AI platform & cloud architecture

• Architect AI and Data Platforms using a mix of technologies including Databricks, Snowflake, Claude Enterprise and the native services of Azure, AWS and GCP - selecting the right tool for the workload rather than defaulting to a single vendor.
• Design for scalability, security, cost efficiency and multi-cloud / hybrid patterns, with a strong grasp of containerisation, infrastructure-as-code, event-driven architectures and CI/CD.
• Balance technical excellence with delivery pragmatism and commercial realities, championing the path from prototype to production.

Enterprise AI ecosystem integration

• Bring awareness of the broader enterprise landscape and how AI integrates with core operational systems such as SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow and other systems of record and engagement.
• Design integration patterns that let AI capabilities interoperate safely with enterprise data, identity, workflow and process automation platforms – including MCP and A2A and how these capabilities enable an enterprise Agent mesh.
• Understand the data, governance and change implications of embedding AI into mission-critical enterprise processes.

Orchestration & control plane

• Architect the orchestration and control-plane layer that governs how AI capabilities are exposed, routed and managed across the enterprise.
• Design MCP, AI and LLM gateway layers for secure, observable and policy-controlled access to models and tools.
• Design agent and skills registries — including recommending suitable technologies and patterns — to enable discovery, reuse and governance of agentic capabilities.
• Define the control plane for routing, rate limiting, cost management, model selection and version control across multiple model providers.

AI solution design

• Design retrieval and reasoning architectures including RAG, corrective RAG (CRAG), and agentic patterns, selecting the right approach for a given business problem.
• Architect agent harnesses and their components — planning, memory, tool use, state management and multi-agent coordination.
• Design prompt strategies, context management and grounding approaches for reliable, production-grade LLM behaviour.

Evaluation, guardrails & responsible AI

• Design evaluation frameworks and guardrails that make AI systems safe, reliable and measurable — covering accuracy, safety, bias, and task success.
• Embed responsible-AI and governance controls aligned to emerging regulation and client risk appetites.
• Define human-in-the-loop and fallback strategies for high-stakes use cases.

Observability & operations

• Architect logging, monitoring, tracing and cost-observability across the AI stack, including model, agent and platform telemetry.
• Design for drift detection, performance monitoring and continuous evaluation in production (LLMOps / MLOps).
• Establish operational patterns for reliability, incident response and lifecycle management of AI systems at scale.

Your skills and experience

We're seeking a technically credible, commercially aware leader who brings a rare combination of architectural depth, delivery accountability and client advisory skill — someo