{"id":4137318,"url":"https://alion.io/job/ifs-ai-architect","title":"AI Architect","company":{"id":4263,"name":"IFS","domain":"ifs.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/ifs","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"SmartRecruiters","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":76,"open_postings":41,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.976,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":41,"computed_at":"2026-11-12T10:38:37Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Colombo, Sri Lanka"],"countries":["LK"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-11-12T03:20:30Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-11-12","last_verified_at":"2026-11-13T05:02:05Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":1,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":1},"description":"IFS is a billion-dollar revenue company with 7000+ employees on all continents. Our leading AI technology is the backbone of our award-winning enterprise software solutions, enabling our customers to be their best when it really matters-at the Moment of Service™. Our commitment to internal AI adoption has allowed us to stay at the forefront of technological advancements, ensuring our colleagues can unlock their creativity and productivity, and our solutions are always cutting-edge.\nAt IFS, we’re flexible, we’re innovative, and we’re focused not only on how we can engage with our customers but on how we can make a real change and have a worldwide impact. We help solve some of society’s greatest challenges, fostering a better future through our agility, collaboration, and trust.\nWe celebrate diversity and understand our responsibility to reflect the diverse world we work in. We are committed to promoting an inclusive workforce that fully represents the many different cultures, backgrounds, and viewpoints of our customers, our partners, and our communities. As a truly international company serving people from around the globe, we realize that our success is tantamount to the respect we have for those different points of view.\nBy joining our team, you will have the opportunity to be part of a global, diverse environment; you will be joining a winning team with a commitment to sustainability; and a company where we get things done so that you can make a positive impact on the world.\nWe’re looking for innovative and original thinkers to work in an environment where you can #MakeYourMoment so that we can help others make theirs. With the power of our AI-driven solutions, we empower our team to change the status quo and make a real difference.\nIf you want to change the status quo, we’ll help you make your moment. Join Team Purple. Join IFS.\n Position Summary\nThe AI Architect is responsible for maintaining architectural coherence across GCS AI and Frictionless Time to Value (FTTV) initiatives. The role works at the front end of the process, participating in use-case and initiative shaping, backlog review, and initial solution definition before significant engineering effort is committed.\nThe architect reviews proposed AI applications and FTTV solutions to determine whether they align with GCS strategy, fit the existing application, process, and tooling landscape, and make appropriate use of existing knowledge, integrations, services, and reusable components. Working closely with AI Engineering and FTTV stakeholders, the architect helps define standards, reusable patterns, solution boundaries, and cross-initiative connection points.\nThis is a Senior Lead-level individual contributor role. It does not manage an engineering squad or replace AI Engineering accountability for detailed design, implementation, code quality, production readiness, or delivery assurance. The architect is not expected to be the sole expert in every technical domain, but is responsible for ensuring that the appropriate specialists review the solution.\nKey Responsibilities\nGCS AI and FTTV Solution Shaping\nParticipate in the review and maintenance of the complete GCS AI backlog and the shaping of FTTV initiatives, with particular focus on work entering solution definition.\nAssess whether proposed applications and FTTV solutions support GCS strategy, process direction, and the intended tooling landscape.\nIdentify duplicate, overlapping, unnecessarily isolated, or technically unclear proposals across the GCS AI backlog and FTTV initiatives before significant engineering effort is committed.\nWork with business stakeholders and AI Engineering to refine use cases, clarify solution boundaries, and identify dependencies, integration points, and ownership.\nProvide architecture input into GCS AI backlog and FTTV initiative decisions without assuming ownership of business prioritization.\nReuse, Integration, and Knowledge\nIdentify where GCS AI applications and FTTV solutions should reuse existing services, integrations, knowledge assets, evaluation approaches, or common components.\nWork with AI Engineering to determine when a capability should be shared and when an application-specific implementation is more maintainable.\nIdentify required connection points between solutions and ensure their purpose, ownership, and expected behavior are understood before implementation.\nReview how structured knowledge is created, organized, accessed, and reused across AI applications and related FTTV solutions.\nPromote consistent approaches to knowledge ownership, source traceability, permissions, versioning, update responsibility, and retirement.\nChallenge solution-specific knowledge stores when an appropriate governed source exists or is planned, while avoiding reuse that creates hidden coupling or unclear ownership.\nArchitecture Standards and Exceptions\nWork collaboratively with AI Engineering leads and developers to define practical architecture standards, reference patterns, and reusable approaches.\nDistinguish between mandatory constraints, preferred patterns, implementation guidance, and examples.\nReview how agreed standards are applied during solution shaping and propose changes when standards are unclear, outdated, or produce unintended results.\nIdentify and document justified exceptions, including their scope, consequences, dependencies, and support implications.\nPresent proposed exceptions for approval to Customer AI Experience leadership.\nTreat recurring exceptions as evidence that a standard may need to change rather than repeatedly bypassing it.\nSpecialist Review and Technical Alignment\nDetermine which specialist perspectives are required for each proposed solution and involve them early enough to affect the design.\nEnsure appropriate review of material decisions involving security, privacy, responsible AI, enterprise architecture, data, integrations, infrastructure, business processes, and product platforms.\nBring conflicting recommendations to the appropriate decision-makers with the options and trade-offs clearly stated.\nConfirm that specialist recommendations are reflected in the proposed architecture or are addressed through a documented and approved exception.\nAvoid making decisions on behalf of specialist functions where authority or expertise sits elsewhere.\nCollaboration with AI Engineering and FTTV Stakeholders\nAct as an architectural counterpart to AI Engineering leads and FTTV stakeholders during initiative shaping and initial solution definition.\nProvide architectural direction without assuming responsibility for squad management or engineering delivery.\nWork directly with developers when technical detail is required to evaluate a design, dependency, reuse opportunity, or proposed standard.\nUse engineering and stakeholder feedback to test whether proposed standards and reusable approaches are practical.\nSupport consistency across initiatives and engineering squads without introducing an additional approval layer for routine implementation decisions.\nTechnical Validation and Decision Traceability\nRemain technically current enough to challenge assumptions and evaluate proposed designs credibly.\nPrototype selected concepts, inspect implementations, or develop reference examples when needed to validate an architecture decision.\nUse technical validation selectively; the role is not intended to provide routine development capacity.\nMaintain a current view of the GCS AI and FTTV solution landscape, including major boundaries, shared capabilities, dependencies, integrations, and knowledge relationships.\nDocument material architecture decisions, rationale, ownership, and approved exceptions at a level proportionate to the decision.\nStrategic Alignment with Processes and Tooling\nAssess whether proposed AI applications and FTTV solutions support the intended direction of GCS business processes and operational tooling.\nWork with process, tooling, and functional owners to understand planned changes that may affect solution design.\nIdentify proposals that automate temporary workarounds, reproduce process defects, or create competing sources of process logic.\nMake unresolved process or tooling dependencies visible before engineering commits to an approach.\nSupport a coherent GCS AI and FTTV solution portfolio that can evolve as GCS processes and tooling change without requiring each application or initiative to be independently redesigned.\nRequired Experience\nSignificant experience in software, solution, application, integration, data, or AI architecture across multiple applications or engineering teams.\nExperience shaping technical solutions before implementation and assessing application boundaries, dependencies, integration points, and reuse opportunities.\nPractical experience with AI-enabled applications, including large language models, retrieval-based solutions, agentic systems, and structured and unstructured knowledge.\nStrong understanding of modern software architecture, APIs, distributed systems, cloud services, identity, security, and integration approaches.\nExperience defining architecture standards and reusable patterns collaboratively with engineers.\nAbility to identify duplication, hidden coupling, weak ownership models, and design choices that create long-term maintenance problems.\nAbility to evaluate and explain technical trade-offs to engineering, business, and leadership audiences.\nAbility to work through influence without relying on line authority and to distinguish portfolio-level concerns from engineering implementation decisions.\nSufficient hands-on technical capability to prototype concepts, inspect implementations, and validate architectural assumptions when necessary.\nSound judgment about when to decide, when to involve a specialist, and when to escalate an unresolved trade-off.\nPreferred Experience\nExperience designing or reviewing enterprise AI applications in production.\nExperience with retrieval-augmented generation, agent architectures, shared knowledge services, evaluation frameworks, and AI observability.\nExperience with Azure AI services, Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, or comparable enterprise AI platforms.\nExperience with API-first, event-driven, microservice, and cloud-native solution patterns.\nExperience defining reusable components or platform capabilities across multiple teams.\nExperience with enterprise business applications, ERP, customer delivery, or service-delivery processes.\nFamiliarity with GCS, FTTV, delivery tooling, and AI adoption priorities.\nExperience operating at Senior Lead, Principal, or equivalent individual-contributor level.\nWe embrace flexibility and hybrid work opportunities to support diverse needs and lifestyles, while also valuing inclusive workplace experiences. By fostering a sense of community, we drive innovation, strengthen connections, and nurture belonging. 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