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, Nat West 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.

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.

• 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.

• 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 Lang Chain, Lang Graph 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…