AI Solutions Architect (Team & Technical Lead)

About the role

We are seeking an experienced AI Solutions Architect to lead the design and delivery of end‑to‑end AI/ML solutions for our banking clients in Kuwait. As the anchor hire for the AI Factory, you will own the technical vision, define reusable patterns, and ensure compliance with regulatory and security standards.

Key responsibilities

• Design complete AI/ML architectures from chatbot interfaces through Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) and model layers to data and infrastructure.
• Act as the design authority for both Microsoft Azure (Azure AI Foundry, OpenAI Service, AI Search, Fabric, Kubernetes) and open‑source stacks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, vector stores, vLLM, Hugging Face).
• Define and enforce guardrails, standards, and reusable patterns for AI/ML projects.
• Collaborate with Governance & Security specialists to implement least‑privilege, zero‑trust, encryption, key‑management, and OWASP LLM mitigations.
• Provide day‑to‑day technical leadership, mentorship, and guidance to a small engineering team.

Required profile

• 8+ years of experience in software, data, or AI engineering, with at least 3 years designing production cloud systems.
• Proven ownership of a GenAI/RAG or ML system in production, preferably in banking or another regulated sector.
• Experience working with security, risk, and compliance teams to obtain design approvals in regulated environments.

Required skills

• Microsoft Azure AI services: Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search, Azure Machine Learning, Microsoft Fabric.
• Azure infrastructure: landing‑zone design, VNet, Private Endpoints, API Management, Azure Kubernetes Service, Container Apps.
• Open‑source AI stack: LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, pgvector, Qdrant, Milvus, Weaviate.
• Model serving: vLLM, Ollama, Hugging Face TGI, Llama, Mistral.
• Container and orchestration tools: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform.
• Security and identity: Microsoft Entra ID, Keycloak, RBAC/ABAC, Azure Key Vault, HashiCorp Vault.
• Design for data protection, encryption in transit and at rest, and compliance with Kuwait/CBK data‑residency requirements.