Pre-Sales Solution Architect – Data & AI

Are you the person who can run a C-level briefing in the morning, lead a whiteboard architecture session after lunch, and build a working watsonx agent before the day ends? If so, we'd like to talk to you.

Our Data & AI Practice is growing. We're looking for a Senior Solution Architect to own the technical win on our biggest Data & AI opportunities on the IBM watsonx and Data portfolio, from first discovery through to a compliant, winning submission.

What you'll do

Win the deal

• Analyze RFPs, RFIs and SOWs. Build compliance matrices and gap analyses, and flag risks and scoring drivers.
• Shape win themes, competitive battlecards and clarification questions within tender deadlines.
• Write technical proposals that score well with government evaluation committees.

Design the solution

• Design end-to-end Data & AI architectures covering ingestion, Lakehouse, governance, model serving and agent orchestration.
• Size platforms for on-prem, hybrid, sovereign and air-gapped deployments, including GPU and OpenShift capacity.
• Address UAE-specific needs: data residency, Arabic/bilingual support and federal AI gateway constraints.

Prove it works

• Build demos and POCs on watsonx Orchestrate, watsonx.ai and watsonx.data using realistic, client-specific data.
• Develop custom tools, connectors and MCP servers in Python for agent integrations.
• Lead live client demonstrations and PoC evaluations.

Engage and enable

• Lead discovery workshops and executive briefings and turn business problems into AI use cases with measurable outcomes.
• Equip account managers with pitch material and talk tracks, and hand over well-documented solutions to delivery teams.

The stack you'll own

• Agents & Automation: watsonx Orchestrate (ADK, AgentOps), ODM, Cloud Pak for Business Automation (expert, hands-on)
• AI Models: watsonx.ai, IBM Granite, sovereign Arabic LLMs such as Jais (expert)
• AI Governance: watsonx.governance (expert, our lead differentiator)
• Data Platform: watsonx.data, watsonx.data intelligence, Cloud Pak for Data, Cloudera (strong)
• Platform: Red Hat OpenShift (working knowledge)

What you bring

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, Data Science or a related field
• 7+ years in data, analytics or AI, including at least 4 years in customer-facing pre-sales or solution architecture
• A proven record of winning large public-sector or enterprise bids and owning the technical response end to end
• Hands-on experience with IBM watsonx or Cloud Pak for Data (MUST)
• Practical knowledge of GenAI and agentic AI: LLMs, RAG, vector stores, embeddings, multi-agent orchestration and tool calling
• A solid data engineering background: Lakehouse, ETL/ELT, streaming (Kafka/Confluent), catalogues and lineage
• Enough Python to build agent tools, API integrations and demo data
• Experience with Kubernetes/OpenShift, on-prem and air-gapped environments
• Excellent written and spoken English, and the ability to explain complex architecture in plain business language
• Comfort working to tight tender deadlines

Nice to have

• Arabic (spoken and written)
• IBM watsonx certifications or IBM Technical Sales badges
• Red Hat OpenShift, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud or TOGAF certifications
• Experience with UAE federal procurement and ICV scoring
• Knowledge of AI regulation: UAE AI policies, EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF
• Experience with MCP, A2A protocols, Microsoft Graph or SAP OData

You'll work with account managers, delivery teams, IBM technical sellers and client engineering on some of the most important AI programmes in the UAE, and your work will shape how government and enterprise put agentic AI into production.

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