AI Solution Architect

No H-1B, OPT, or visa sponsorship will be provided or accepted. About Shelf Everyone is talking about agentic AI. One problem: nobody is handing the keys to an agent that still guesses. One hallucination in a 20-step workflow, and everything breaks. The real bottleneck isn't the model. It's deterministic answers. Deterministic answers require an enterprise knowledge vault. We've spent the last eight years building exactly that. Now we're building the rest of the stack. About the Role The AI Solution Architect is Shelf's solution design authority in customer-facing engagements, translating complex enterprise data and GenAI challenges into concrete, deployable architectures. This role combines deep expertise in AI systems, enterprise architecture, and data modeling with the ability to engage senior technical stakeholders and design end-to-end solutions that prove measurable value and scale into production. You'll engage early in the sales cycle, leading pre-sales technical conversations on architecture, security, and deployment strategy with senior prospect and customer stakeholders. Operating at a high level, you'll run technical discovery, design the target solution, and guide proof-of-value pilots that demonstrate Shelf's value on a prospect's real data, working directly alongside Engineering throughout. Beyond the initial win, you'll define the reference architecture that guides production rollout and expansion. Reporting to the Field CTO, you'll partner with Account Executives throughout the sales cycle, with primary responsibility during technical evaluation and pilots. You'll collaborate with Customer Success through deal closing, onboarding, and initial enablement, and contribute to our land-and-expand growth strategy by architecting solutions that grow within existing accounts. Your insights from the field will feed directly into product direction through structured feedback to our CTO and Product leadership. The ideal candidate brings 8-12+ years combining deep technical depth in data and AI platforms with customer-facing solution design. You're equally comfortable whiteboarding a target architecture with a CTO and getting into the detail of a pilot alongside Engineering. You communicate credibly at a senior level while maintaining the technical depth to go deep when it counts. Experience with knowledge graphs, ontologies, or semantic technologies is strongly preferred, though exceptional data modeling and architecture expertise can substitute. What You'll Do Lead pre-sales technical conversations on architecture, security, and deployment strategy with senior prospect and customer stakeholders. Lead solution design and technical discovery, translating customer data architectures, GenAI initiatives, and integration requirements into concrete target architectures. Design and guide proof-of-value pilots that prove measurable value on customer data, working directly alongside Engineering. Define reference architectures and solution designs that guide production rollout and scale within accounts. Present solutions to Enterprise Architects, Data Leaders, AI/ML Engineers, and senior technical decision-makers, translating technical capabilities into business value. Support Account Executives throughout sales cycles with primary ownership during technical evaluation and pilot phases. Collaborate with Customer Success through deal closing, onboarding, and initial enablement. Support existing customer expansion opportunities as part of our land-and-expand strategy. Build reusable ontology templates, reference architectures, and solution best practices in collaboration with the Field CTO and Engineering. Provide structured field feedback to CTO and Product leadership to influence roadmap and strategic direction. Ideal Candidate Solution Architecture Expertise – Designs end-to-end technical solutions and reference architectures; translates ambiguous enterprise requirements into clear, deployable designs. Enterprise Technical Autho…