AI Solutions Architect

Who we are Optima Partners is an advanced data and business consultancy headquartered in Edinburgh, UK. We are a practitioner-led organisation that collaborates with top consumer brands to drive transformation and foster customer-centricity through our expertise in customer strategy, innovative design and advanced data science and engineering. We are proud to include leading UK and global brands among our current clients, including Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest Group, Bank of Ireland, Nationwide, Aviva, Biogen, Eon Next, OVO, Virgin Media O2, BT, HMD Global, Centrica and GSK. We are obsessive about delivering value for our clients and work in a collaborative, engaged and creative way with our colleagues and clients. The opportunity We are looking for an AI Solutions Architect to define and deliver end-to-end AI solution architectures that help clients transform business processes, improve decision-making and unlock measurable value from modern AI. With a strong focus on generative AI, agentic AI, retrieval-augmented generation and cloud-native delivery, this role combines hands-on technical leadership with the ability to translate complex business challenges into scalable, secure and production-ready solutions. As part of Optima’s growing AI capability within Engineering, you will work closely with colleagues across data science, data engineering, consulting and client engagement to shape client AI strategies, lead proof-of-concepts, establish reusable architecture patterns and support the early industrialisation of AI solutions in real operating environments. What you will be doing • Define and implement end-to-end AI solution architectures that incorporate modern generative and agentic capabilities, ensuring they are scalable, secure and production-ready. • Design AI application patterns such as RAG, orchestration and multi-agent workflows, tool and function calling, and human-in-the-loop processes, integrating them with enterprise data, APIs and microservices. • Ensure AI solutions integrate cleanly into cloud-native PaaS and SaaS environments, with robust approaches to real-time and batch processing where required. • Establish best practices for prompt engineering, model selection, grounding, evaluation and guardrails across AI solutions. • Lead AI and LLM proof-of-concepts at client sites, rapidly demonstrating how generative and agentic approaches can deliver measurable business value. • Apply hands-on experience of agentic capability, including tool use, orchestration, autonomous and multi-agent workflows, to design and build working solutions rather than conceptual designs alone. • Support early industrialisation of AI solutions, contributing to the adoption of MLOps, LLMOps and AIOps practices such as evaluation, observability, versioning and responsible deployment. • Ensure AI solutions meet relevant standards and regulations for security, privacy and responsible AI, particularly in public sector and regulated environments. What skills we would like you to have • Experience designing and delivering end-to-end AI solution architectures, including LLM applications, RAG-based systems, AI agents, agentic workflows and intelligent automation. • Strong understanding of solution architecture principles, cloud-native design, enterprise integration, APIs, microservices and scalable software delivery. • Hands-on capability with Python and SQL, with practical knowledge of AI orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph or similar technologies. • Knowledge of vector databases, semantic retrieval, prompt engineering, model selection, grounding techniques, evaluation approaches and AI guardrails. • Experience working with cloud environments and enterprise platforms, with Azure experience preferred, and an understanding of PaaS, SaaS, real-time and batch processing patterns. • Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD, infrastructure approaches, MLOps, LLMOps, AIOps, observability, versioning and production operations would be advantageous. • Strong understanding of responsible AI, security, privacy, governance, data lifecycle and data quality considerations, including risks such as hallucination, bias, data leakage and prompt injection. • Excellent consulting, communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate business needs into clear technical direction for both technical and non-technical audiences. • Commercial curiosity, a proactive mindset and a passion for emerging AI technologies, reusable accelerators and identifying opportunities to create measurable business value. This is an exciting opportunity to work directly with clients, shaping and delivering production-ready AI architectures that help organisations realise the potential of generative and agentic AI at scale, while developing your career within a specialist data, AI and engineering consultancy. What we offer • Competitive base salary. • Inclusion in our annual discretionary bonus plan with an on-target performance bonus of up to 15%. • Up to 37 days holiday inclusive of personal and public allocations. Seven are fixed days for Christmas and New Year, and 30 are floating days taken at your discretion, subject to client scheduling and line manager approval. • Private medical insurance, single cover. • Group life and income protection insurance. • Salary sacrifice pension scheme after three months’ employment. • Access to over 1,000 perks and discounts via an employee discount portal. • Dedicated development time plus tools and funding to support personal and professional development.