AI Foundation Architect (AI)

Location: Canary Wharf, London, UK; hybrid with 2–3 days per week in the office

Salary: £90,000–£115,000 gross annual base salary for Senior level or £115,000–£138,000 for Principal level, depending on experience and scope.

Company

hirify.global is an international group of 2,800 consultants and experts across 28 countries that designs data and AI foundations for intelligent enterprise systems.

What you will do

• Define target architectures for production GenAI and agentic systems across models, agents, enterprise data, applications, APIs, cloud infrastructure, security, and operations.
• Establish architecture principles, reference patterns, technical boundaries, non-functional requirements, and architecture decision records.
• Review solution and engineering designs and approve material decisions covering platform selection, model access, integrations, deployment, scalability, resilience, and observability.
• Design secure, reliable, scalable, operable foundations with identity, access, auditability, recovery, maintainability, and human-control requirements.
• Own architecture-level AI FinOps, including model and provider routing, consumption, capacity, and cost optimisation.
• Guide AI, Software, Data, Governance, and delivery teams while engaging client architects and converting decisions into reusable hirify.global assets.

Requirements

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Typically 8+ years designing and owning architecture for complex production technology environments, with accountability for cross-system technical decisions.
• Recent practical experience architecting production GenAI, LLM, or agentic systems and understanding how models, data, applications, integrations, and infrastructure interact.
• Experience working with client architects, engineering leaders, security teams, and technical decision-makers.
• Native or bilingual-level English, written and spoken.
• Deep architecture expertise in at least one major cloud and AI ecosystem, with the breadth to evaluate comparable technologies and integration approaches.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, APIs, integration architecture, identity and access, security, scalability, resilience, observability, and production operations.
• Experience with data architecture including lakehouse, data mesh, streaming, and feature stores.
• Experience architecting RAG, agentic, or multi-model systems; model access and deployment patterns; MLOps/LLMOps; CI/CD; containers; infrastructure automation; and monitoring.
• Experience conducting architecture reviews and guiding multiple engineering disciplines within a shared target architecture.

Nice to have

• AI agent platform engineering, reusable execution environments, tool gateways, permissions, shared observability, and runtime controls.
• Reference implementations or technical spikes, enterprise architecture frameworks, or formal architecture-governance processes.
• Experience with hybrid, sovereign, regulated, security-sensitive, event-driven, streaming, distributed, or high-scale AI architectures.
• Consulting or client-facing experience, including international projects or multicultural teams.

Culture & Benefits

• Employee contract with full-time hybrid work in the London office.
• Competitive holiday allowance, private medical and dental insurance, group life insurance, and an auto-enrolment pension scheme.
• Gym access and fitness, lifestyle, travel, retail, and entertainment discounts.
• Training and development through hirify.global Learning Experience, with career development and internal mobility opportunities.
• Electric and hybrid car scheme, annual discretionary bonus, and referral bonus.
• Recruitment stages are conducted and evaluated by human recruiters and interviewers; candidate use of AI assistance during interviews is strictly prohibited and may result in disqualification.

Hiring process

• Recruitment interviews and evaluations are conducted by human recruiters and interviewers.
• AI tools may not be used during the recruitment interview process; use may result in immediate disqualification.