Senior Solution Design Consultant; AI

IWU is seeking a Senior Solution Design Consultant for AI and Traditional Software (Independent Contractor - 1099 / Contract-to-Hire) to add their expertise to major university wide application refactoring and software development efforts on Sovereign AI-First platforms to advance large-scale technology reorganization projects.

• Build real AI-First based solutions
  , not just bolt-on 3rd party solutions. IWU is reengineering the core of higher education from the ground up.
• IWU is re-platforming its enterprise on a multi-site, active/active, and on-premises data center foundation and an AI-first application stack
  . Every major initiative needs a solution designer who can translate business intent into buildable specifications – integration patterns, data flows, API contracts, and AI workflow design that can be implemented using advanced “
  Enterprise Vibe Coding
  ” standards that development teams can implement without guesswork. We are seeking a senior practitioner with extensive AI experience to guide end-to-end solution design for process reengineering, existing application re-platforming, and new product development work streams.
• This is a hands-on role using the latest AI enabled Enterprise Level Vibe Coding Standards
  . IWU runs workloads on infrastructure we own and operate in multiple commercial colocation facilities. You will design enterprise application and Sovereign AI Agentic solutions that fit our platform – RAG pipelines, agent-assisted workflows, API integrations, and modern application patterns – within standards set by Enterprise Architecture and Information Security.
• You will be a senior individual contributor with broad influence
  : you will elicit and document requirements, produce decision-quality design artifacts, facilitate trade-off conversations with business and technical stakeholders, and partner with developers, data engineers, and platform teams until the solution is built, tested, and operational.

• Lead end-to-end solution design for assigned work streams – current-state is already well documented, you will help build future-state vision, gap analysis, and RAD approaches aligned to the re-platforming roadmap.
• Produce solution design documents – context diagrams, sequence flows, data models, integration specifications, non-functional requirements, and acceptance criteria that development teams can implement and test against.
• Run design workshops with business owners, product leads, and engineers – capture decisions, assumptions, constraints, and open questions with clear owners and dates.
• Maintain requirements traceability – from requirement capture and business outcomes through design artifact to implemented feature for audit, change control, and benefits tracking.

• Design AI-first enabled business solutions –
  Agentic / retrieval-augmented generation (
  RAG
  ), conversational interfaces, agent-assisted workflows, document intelligence, and decision-support features – that map to our on-premises AI platform capabilities.
• Specify LLM integration patterns – prompt contracts, context assembly, tool-use boundaries, guardrails, fallback behavior, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints appropriate to risk and regulatory context.
• Design data and retrieval flows for AI features – source systems, embedding pipelines, vector store boundaries, freshness requirements, and authorization models that respect FERPA and institutional data classification.
• Partner with the Enterprise AI Architects on platform fit – you design what the solution needs; the architect sets what the platform provides – and escalates exceptions with documented rationale.

• Support development…