AI Architect Presales - URGENT

YASH Technologies; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading technology solutions company in Chicago seeks an experienced Senior AI Architect with 12-15 years of experience in enterprise AI and Generative AI solutions. The successful candidate will design and deliver scalable AI platforms while engaging with clients and leading pre-sales efforts. Strong strategic and technical skills are essential, along with a proven track record in AI architecture. The role offers competitive remuneration and the opportunity to influence the AI landscape within organizations.

Qualifications

• 12–15 years of total experience, with at least 6+ years in AI architecture & solution design.
• 3+ years in pre-sales or client-facing roles.
• Proven track record in delivering AI-driven business solutions at enterprise scale.

Responsibilities

• Architect scalable, secure, and high-performance AI/ML platforms.
• Design end-to-end AI reference architectures.
• Act as a trusted AI advisor to client executives.

Skills

AI/ML architecture

Client engagement

Pre-sales solutioning

Technical strategy

Team leadership

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or Artificial Intelligence

Tools

MS Visio

PowerPoint

Excel-based ROI models

Job description

Must have 12 + years of experience

Overview

An accomplished Senior AI Architect with 12–15 years of progressive experience in designing, building, and delivering enterprise-scale AI and Generative AI (GenAI) solutions across public cloud ecosystems (Azure, AWS, GCP). The ideal candidate will serve as both a technical strategist and client-facing leader, driving AI architecture design, pre-sales solutioning, client engagement, and innovation leadership across diverse industry verticals.

This role blends deep technical expertise with strong business acumen — ideal for someone who can translate cutting-edge AI capabilities into measurable business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Architect scalable, secure, and high-performance AI/ML and GenAI platforms leveraging cloud-native services and frameworks.
• Design end-to-end AI reference architectures, covering data ingestion, model development, deployment, governance, and LLMOps.
• Evaluate and integrate LLMs, vector databases, and RAG pipelines for enterprise use cases (e.g., chatbots, copilots, document analyzers, and cognitive automation).

Pre-Sales & Business Development

• Partner with sales, account, and delivery teams to lead AI opportunity qualification, scoping, and solutioning.
• Conduct customer discovery workshops, PoC planning, and technical presentations to articulate AI value propositions.
• Prepare solution proposals, cost estimates, effort models, and architecture diagrams tailored to client requirements.
• Contribute to RFP/RFI responses, bid defense, and client demonstrations showcasing AI capabilities and differentiators.

Client Engagement & Relationship Management

• Act as a trusted AI advisor to client executives, helping shape their AI strategy and roadmap.
• Manage CXO-level discussions, handle technical objections, and translate complex AI concepts into business-friendly narratives.
• Foster long-term relationships with customers to identify expansion opportunities and drive AI adoption maturity.

Delivery Governance & Leadership

• Oversee architecture reviews, design validation, and technical quality assurance across AI projects.
• Collaborate with delivery teams to ensure architecture alignment, scalability, and operational efficiency.
• Mentor and guide AI engineers, data scientists, and solution architects, fostering innovation and continuous learning.

Innovation & Thought Leadership

• Evaluate new AI/GenAI technologies, frameworks, and models (e.g., GPT-4/4o, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, Mistral).
• Develop accelerators, reusable assets, and reference implementations to enhance pre-sales effectiveness.
• Represent the organization at industry forums, webinars, and client advisory boards as an AI thought leader.
• GenAI/LLM Expertise: Prompt engineering, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), fine-tuning, embeddings, and vector DBs (Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS, Cosmos DB, Milvus).
• GCP: Vertex AI, BigQuery ML.
• Data Engineering: Knowledge of data lakes, feature stores, and streaming systems (Kafka, EventHub).
• Business & Pre-Sales Tools: MS Visio, PowerPoint, Excel-based ROI models, cost estimators, proposal templates.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or Artificial Intelligence.
• 12–15 years of total experience, with at least 6+ years in AI architecture & solution design and 3+ years in pre-sales or client-facing roles.
• Proven track record in conceptualizing and delivering AI-driven business solutions at enterprise scale.
• Certifications in Azure AI Engineer, AWS ML Specialty, or GCP ML Engineer preferred.
• Strong presentation, storytelling, and negotiation skills.

Preferred Attributes

• Experience in building and leading AI CoEs or innovation teams.
• Deep understanding of Responsible AI, governance, and model risk frameworks.
• Ability to balance technical depth with executive-level communication.
• Demonstrated success in winning deals or expanding AI engagements through consultative selling.