AI Solution Architect

About us

We're an independent European digital product studio with a strong track record of delivering market-defining strategies and products for enterprises and governments. With about 200 talented people across three countries, premium AI capabilities and a diverse portfolio of international clients, we define, design and ship high-quality digital products, strategies and software. From global cloud-based platforms and large-scale apps to medical devices, banking software and augmented reality experiences. In a nutshell: if it lives and breathes digital, it’s what we do best.

Become a part of our team

At In The Pocket, you join a multidisciplinary team of designers, engineers, strategists and data specialists who care about the work as much as the people they work with. We work in small, autonomous teams that stay close to our clients and their users, and we give everyone the space to take ownership, speak up and grow. You’ll learn from colleagues across our studios, ship products that reach thousands or even millions of people and help shape what digital can do for leading organisations in Europe.

What you’ll do 

You design the whole solution: the product, its integrations with the client's landscape, the data, the infrastructure, and the AI that makes it smarter. You make sure the architecture is sound, fits the business case and can evolve along with the product. And you're not an architect who draws boxes and leaves the building to others. You prove your choices with your own hands and stay close to the team while they build.

Own the solution architecture

• Make sure the architecture of your products is sound, well understood and evolves in line with the business case.
• Lead architectural debates and decisions. You make trade-offs explicit, document them in ADRs, and keep internal teams, clients and suppliers aligned.
• Design solutions that fit the client's reality: their existing systems, data, integrations, security requirements and the way their people work.

Bring AI in where it adds value

• Design AI-powered solutions such as agents, multimodal retrieval, assistants, document analysis and advanced search, and integrate them into the wider architecture.
• Make the AI calls explicit: whether AI is the right answer at all, foundation models or custom ones, RAG or fine-tuning, managed cloud services or self-hosted, agents or a plain workflow, and when a human stays in the loop. You weigh speed, accuracy and cost.
• Design for life after launch: scaling, cost control, evaluation, observability and LLMOps/MLOps for model upgrades and redeployment.
• Build security and governance in from the start, including access control, explainability, GDPR and the EU AI Act, especially in regulated environments.

Shape the deal

• Work with sales in pre-sales. You gather the prospect's needs, shape the solution and the offer, and turn vague requirements and AI ambitions into a realistic, buildable plan.
• Be the bridge between engineering, data, product and business leadership.

Prove it works

• Build proofs of concept yourself, including with GenAI, to de-risk the big decisions before a team commits to them.
• Stay close to the delivery teams, unblock them, and adjust the architecture when reality pushes back.

Grow the people around you

• Make engineers better through design reviews, pairing and honest feedback on their work.
• Mentor engineers and tech leads who are growing towards architecture.
• Share what you learn in ADRs, Confluence pages, demos and internal sessions, and help define our reference architectures and standards.
• Join technical interviews and help us recognize real architecture talent.

Who you are 

• You have at least five years as a software engineer and experience as a solution architect or in a similar role.
• You're fluent in Domain-Driven Design and modern patterns such as microservices, event-driven, RAG and agentic architectures, and you know when not to use them.
• You have broad technical knowledge and you work well with subject-matter experts to go deep where needed.
• You have proven experience with SDLC, CI/CD and DevOps, and you model architecture with C4, UML and ADRs.
• You understand secure delivery (OWASP, threat modelling, SAST/DAST) and extend it to AI risks: data exposure, prompt injection and misuse.
• You've designed and shipped LLM-based solutions in production. You know what they can do, where they break, what the risks are and what they cost at scale.
• You know your way around retrieval, embeddings and vector databases, agents and tools (such as MCP), evaluation, and the AI services of at least one major cloud (Azure, AWS or GCP).
• You still code well enough to build a convincing proof of concept.
• You're pragmatic. You choose the simplest solution that ships and can explain why.
• You tell a good story. You explain complex solutions to non-technical audiences, all the way up to executives, through storytelling and presentations.
• You're a strong facilitator who asks the right questions, isn't afraid of difficult topics and is at home at a whiteboard.
• You're a team player who welcomes feedback, appreciates good product design and thrives in a fast-paced environment.
• You're fluent in English and Dutch.

What we offer   

Joining In The Pocket means becoming part of a team that shapes the future of our clients’ businesses across Europe. Here’s what you can look forward to:

• You’ll start with a permanent contract in a role that comes with responsibility and the opportunity to make a real impact from day one.
• We offer a competitive salary that reflects your experience and the value you bring.
• Our benefits package has you covered with hospitalisation and group insurance, meal vouchers, a phone subscription, and more.
• You’ll have a mobility budget that lets you decide how to get around, your way. 
• Life at In The Pocket isn’t just about work, we host team events throughout the year to celebrate, connect, and have fun together.
• Learning never stops here, so after six months, you’ll receive a dedicated learning and development budget to keep growing your skills and exploring new horizons.