VP of Solutions Architect - AI

Robots & Pencils is seeking a seasoned AWS AI Solutions Architect to lead the design and delivery of complex, enterprise-grade generative and agentic AI systems built on Amazon Web Services. You will architect scalable, secure, and production-ready AI platforms leveraging Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, AWS Strands Agents, AWS AgentCore Gateway, Nova Forge, Nova 2 Sonic, and related AWS AI/ML services. As an AWS AI Solutions Architect, you will serve as a strategic technical advisor—translating ambiguity into structured AWS-native architectures, validating designs through hands-on prototyping, and ensuring every solution aligns with the AWS Well-Architected Framework (including ML Lens) while delivering measurable business value. **Key Responsibilities** **Client Engagement & AWS Solutions Architecture** - Serve as the primary AWS AI architecture partner for strategic clients, driving generative and agentic AI system design from discovery through production. - Lead architecture design using Amazon Bedrock (including foundation models and custom models), Bedrock AgentCore, AWS Strands Agents, and AWS AgentCore Gateway. - Design advanced RAG, Agentic RAG, and multi-agent orchestration architectures leveraging AWS-native services such as Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Aurora (pgvector), and OpenSearch. - Produce AWS reference architectures, architecture decision records (ADRs), and implementation roadmaps aligned to business objectives. - Validate feasibility through hands-on prototyping in Python using Bedrock SDKs, SageMaker, and serverless services. - Ensure architectures follow AWS security best practices (IAM, KMS, VPC, PrivateLink) and cost optimization principles. **Outcome Ownership & Business Impact** - Own architectural integrity from concept through production deployment on AWS. - Align solutions with AWS Well-Architected Framework pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency, Cost Optimization, and Sustainability. - Guide clients through tradeoff decisions across model selection (Bedrock FMs vs custom SageMaker models), latency, cost, governance, and compliance. Accelerate time-to-value through reusable AWS accelerators, Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation/Terraform/CDK), and CI/CD automation. - Continuously evaluate emerging AWS AI capabilities (Nova Forge, Nova 2 Sonic, Bedrock updates, and new AgentCore capabilities). **Engineering Leadership & Delivery Excellence** - Provide architectural oversight to Forward Deployed Engineers and AWS delivery teams. - Establish best practices for MLOps on AWS including model lifecycle management, monitoring, and observability using SageMaker, CloudWatch, CloudTrail, and AWS Config. - Define governance, responsible AI guardrails, Bedrock Guardrails configuration, and security controls for enterprise environments. - Mentor engineers on AWS AI service integration, distributed systems design, and secure multi-account strategies. - Make principled tradeoffs under constraints related to privacy, compliance (SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR), cost, and operational complexity. **Cross-Functional Collaboration** - Partner with internal product, engineering, research, and customer success teams to evolve AWS-based AI offerings. - Contribute AWS reference architectures and reusable infrastructure modules to internal accelerators. - Support pre-sales engagements including architecture workshops, AWS migration strategy, and solution scoping. - Collaborate across distributed teams and client stakeholders across North America. **Required Skills & Qualifications** - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience. - 10+ years of experience in software engineering or cloud architecture with deep AWS ownership. - Deep expertise in Amazon Bedrock, Bedrock AgentCore, AWS Strands Agents, AgentCore Gateway, and related AWS AI services. - Strong familiarity with SageMaker (training, deployment, pipelines), deep learning fund…