Senior AI Solutions Architect

Role Purpose

The Senior AI Solutions Architect is the senior technical authority and trusted advisor for Cassava’s AI Offerings to customers. This is a deeply technical, hands-on, customer-facing role responsible for winning the "technical sale". As defined by Gartner, the AI Architect is the "glue" between data scientists, engineers, business leaders, and operations teams. AI Solutions Architect will partner with other Cassava BU’s Senior AI Solutions Leads in a "Hunter Pod" to bridge the gap between complex business problems and our advanced technical solutions.

The AI Solutions Architect mission is to design, and validate robust, scalable, and secure AI and HPC solutions on Cassava's NVIDIA-powered AI Factory. This includes leading in-depth discovery workshops, architecting end-to-end solutions, and building compelling Proofs of Value (POVs) that de-risk the customer's investment and demonstrate the clear superiority of our platform. This role requires a hands-on practitioner with a passion for solving the world's most complex computing problems and establishing unimpeachable technical credibility.

The AI Solutions Architect will operate at the intersection of AI engineering, cloud architecture, and enterprise pre-sales strategy, aligning technical design with commercial and business outcomes. Work at the frontier of AI, HPC, and cloud convergence in emerging markets. Ultimately, this position defines how data and the underlying networking, compute and storage infrastructure become the fuel for South Africa’s emerging AI economy, linking infrastructure investments to real-world AI outcomes.This role combines deep technical pre-sales expertise, and client-facing solution consulting, ensuring all AI Factory solutions meet enterprise-grade performance and reliability, and compliance standards.

Role Description

• Lead deep-dive technical workshops with customer stakeholders (data scientists, ML engineers, infrastructure architects) to define and document business problems and technical requirements.
• Translate customer requirements into a detailed technical blueprint and end-to-end solution design, from data pipelines and storage to model training and inference deployment.
• Architect complex, scalable, and secure AI/HPC solutions using our offerings (Bare Metal, GPUaaS, AIFaaS) and underlying technologies (GPUs, hardware, software, storage, connectivity, and AI workloads.
• Evaluate and select the most appropriate technologies, frameworks, and deployment models (e.g., cloud, hybrid, on-prem) for each specific customer use case.
• Ensure all solution designs adhere to enterprise-grade best practices for security, data governance, compliance, and responsible AI.
• Collaborate with the customer and Solutions Lead to define clear, measurable success criteria for technical validation and POVs.
• Lead and, where necessary, personally build and execute hands-on POVs, prototypes, and benchmarks to prove the value and performance of the proposed solution.
• Help resolve complex performance bottlenecks, from bare-metal hardware up to the application and ML framework level.
• Advise clients how to optimize workloads for our infrastructure, including LLM training, fine-tuning, and high-throughput inference.
• Present technical findings, POC results, and architectural recommendations to diverse audiences, from engineers to C-level executives.
• Create and share reusable technical assets (e.g., reference architectures, whitepapers, blogs, code samples, demos) to scale your expertise.
• Act as the voice of the customer, capturing and relaying critical feedback and feature requests to internal product and engineering teams to influence the product roadmap.
• Act as a subject matter expert and thought leader, representing Cassava at industry events, conferences, and technical workshops.
• Mentor and enable other architects, in-country technical specialists, and partners on our solutions and best practices.
• Maintain up-to-date, expert-level knowledge of the rapidly evolving AI/ML landscape, including new models, techniques, and competitor offerings
• Develop technical presentations, POVs, and ROI/TCO models to support AI infrastructure investments.
• Partner with sales teams to develop solution proposals, tender responses, and bids.
• Conduct executive briefings, workshops, and design sprints for complex infrastructure or AI factory projects.
• Collaborate with sales, NVIDIA, and OEM partners to align data management offerings with infrastructure and platform solutions.
• Present solution blueprints to C-suite, CIO, and engineering audiences, aligning with both technical and commercial objectives.
• Thought Leadership: Stay at the forefront of AI, HPC, and cloud infrastructure trends.
• Represent Cassava as a technical expert at industry events, workshops, and conferences.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related technical field: Essential
• Certifications preferred:
  • NVIDIA AI Infrastructure or AI Enterprise Specialist
  • AWS Certified Data Analytics / Azure Data Engineer
  • Snowflake / Databricks Certified Data Architect
  • CDMP, TOGAF, or DAMA DMBOK
• 8+ years of experience in a customer-facing technical role such as Solutions Architect, Pre-Sales Engineer, or Technical Consultant, with at least 5+ years focused on cloud, data, or AI/ML solutions.
• AI/ML & Data Science: Deep understanding of the end-to-end ML lifecycle. Hands-on experience with ML frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX), Generative AI, and LLM architectures (e.g., RAG, fine-tuning).
• HPC & GPU Infrastructure: Hands-on expertise with GPU architecture (NVIDIA preferred), high-performance networking (e.g., InfiniBand), and cluster managers (e.g., Slurm).
• Cloud Native & DevOps: Expert-level knowledge of Kubernetes, containers (Docker), and Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform, Ansible).
• Programming: Strong proficiency in Python and/or C++ for scripting, automation, and debugging.

All Appointments are subject to the Labour Legislation in the respective country.