About the position
Our client, a fast-growing enterprise technology and AI software company, is currently seeking a highly technical Senior Solutions Architect to join their team based in Hazelwood, Pretoria.
The successful candidate will serve as the senior technical authority for enterprise customer engagements, owning the architecture narrative from initial discovery session through to production design, ensuring that all proposed solutions are commercially credible, technically sound, secure, and deployable within complex enterprise environments.
You will work directly with prospects, customers, internal engineering teams, and delivery teams to shape solutions that extend the organisation's platform into customer environments. Be equally comfortable in a boardroom discussion with executives and enterprise architects, as well as detailed working session covering deployment pipelines, identity models, databases, integration patterns, and security controls.
Translate business and operational requirements into cloud-native AI architectures, produce high-quality solution documentation and reference designs, and provide architectural leadership across the customer lifecycle. Play a key role in establishing repeatable enterprise deployment patterns, governance standards, and reusable technical blueprints.
Experience & Capability Requirements:
- 7+ years of experience in solutions architecture, enterprise architecture, platform architecture, or senior technical pre-sales roles.
- Proven track record of architecting and guiding complex enterprise solutions from discovery through to deployment.
- Strong experience designing cloud-native solutions in enterprise environments, preferably including Microsoft Azure.
- Deep understanding of enterprise security architecture, including identity and access management, encryption, networking controls, governance, compliance, and deployment risk management.
- Experience engaging with regulated or security-conscious environments such as financial services, healthcare, mining, telecoms, or similar enterprise sectors.
- Ability to engage confidently at executive and boardroom level while also operating comfortably in detailed technical architecture discussions.
- Strong understanding of deployment architecture, enterprise integration, data flows, databases, APIs, and CI/CD or deployment pipeline design.
- Ability to independently create architecture diagrams, solution designs, technical proposals, and implementation blueprints of a high professional standard.
- Strong commercial judgement, including the ability to balance customer needs, delivery realities, platform constraints, and strategic fit.
- Experience working in high-growth environments where speed, structure, and adaptability are all required.
- Ability to think on your feet, manage ambiguity, and shape practical solutions in collaboration with the CTO and broader leadership team.
Advantageous:
- Experience with private AI deployments, enterprise LLM architectures, RAG, vector search, agentic workflows, or multi-agent systems.
- Exposure to observability, evaluation, MLOps, or production AI governance tooling.
- Familiarity with enterprise procurement processes, architecture review boards, and security approval cycles.
- Exposure to hybrid-cloud or customer-hosted deployment models.
- Experience supporting customers through security reviews, penetration test remediation, or formal compliance processes.
Core competencies:
- Enterprise Architecture
- Agnostic Ecosystem
- Stakeholder Engagement
- Cloud-Native Design
- Security Architecture
- Solution Documentation
- AI / LLM Platforms
- Customer Solutioning
- Reference Architecture
- RAG & Vector Search
- Technical Pre-Sales
- Cross-functional Leadership
Main duties will include, but are not limited to:
- Lead pre-sales technical engagements, qualify opportunities, run discovery workshops, and shape the technical solution from first conversation through to proposal and commercial close.
- Design bespoke AI architectures that extend the organisation's platform into customer environments, including cloud infrastructure, integration patterns, data flows, deployment topologies, and security boundaries.
- Engage C-suite stakeholders, enterprise architects, security teams, and IT leadership at client organisations, translating complex technical concepts into business value, delivery implications, and risk decisions.
- Define secure deployment approaches across enterprise environments, including Azure-based architectures, databases, identity and access controls, networking considerations, CI/CD pipelines, and environment segregation.
- Produce high-quality architecture diagrams, solution documents, scope definitions, reference blueprints, and technical narratives that are clear enough for delivery and engineering teams to implement without ambiguity.
- Act as the senior technical authority during post-sales onboarding and early delivery, ensuring a clean handover from solution design into implementation.
- Work closely with delivery leads, project managers, and technical delivery managers to identify architectural risks, unblock technical decisions, and maintain alignment between customer scope and internal execution.
- Contribute to enterprise security architecture reviews, governance frameworks, compliance discussions, and risk mitigation planning for customer deployments.
- Participate in conversations relating to penetration testing, vulnerability remediation, architecture hardening, audit requirements, and security assurance in regulated environments.
- Define and evolve reusable reference architectures, deployment standards, and enterprise integration patterns that can be reused across customers and sectors.
- Support RFP/RFI responses with technical content, architecture artefacts, implementation assumptions, and solution narratives.
- Mentor internal engineers, delivery architects, and junior technical staff on enterprise architecture principles, customer solutioning, and best practices.
- Serve as a peer-level technical sounding board to the CTO on enterprise architecture decisions, customer-specific solution patterns, and platform evolution.
Desired Skills:
- Solutions Architecture
- Enterprise Architecture
- Platform Architecture
- Cloud Solutions
- Azure
- CI/CD
- Deployment Architecture
- Enterprise Integration
Desired Work Experience:
