Solutions Architect 3 - AI - Digital Architecture

Role: Solutions Architect 3 AI / Digital Architecture
Location: Remote (Preferred - Chicago or Peoria IL)
Let s create our future together at The AES Group!
About The AES Group
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.
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.

Work arrangement
Yes