Senior Manager, AI Architect at Baringa

About Baringa

Baringa is a global consulting firm that partners with leaders to drive change and create value. With deep industry expertise, and enabled by advanced technology, the firm helps clients to deliver with greater confidence and certainty. With over 2,000 people across the UK, Europe, North America, Asia and Australia, the firm combines global insight with local understanding.

The firm works across energy and resources, financial services, government and public sector, consumer products and retail, pharmaceuticals and life sciences, manufacturing, and technology, media and telecoms, with capabilities spanning strategy, transformation and operational excellence – all powered by advanced technology, data, AI and digital innovation.

Clients value Baringa’s collaborative approach and the way its teams integrate seamlessly – all working with a shared understanding of what matters most. The firm is known for its kind, curious experts who listen closely and care deeply about client success as they help clients transform energy markets, modernise financial platforms, expand telecoms and digital networks through advanced data analytics, enable digital services in government, and unlock growth in consumer sectors.

Certified as a Great Place to Work around the world, Baringa has been recognised by the Financial Times in 22 categories of its UK Leading Management Consultants rankings, and by Forbes for four consecutive years as one of the World’s Best Management Consulting Firms.

Our Solutions & AI Lab (SAIL) practice are looking for an experienced AI Architect to join the team.

Our Solutions & AI Labs practice helps clients control their data, turn it into actionable insight, and better leverage it through AI and Machine Learning solutions embedded directly into business processes. We support clients across a range of industries and offer deep expertise in AI/ML, Cloud, Platform Engineering and Managed Solutions.

We are looking for an experienced Senior Manager to serve as an AI Architect — someone who can design the end-to-end architecture for enterprise AI platforms, lead consultancy engagements, and grow our AI & Solutions Engineering capability.

The AI Architect role owns the technical blueprint for AI-enabled solutions delivered in and around our clients’ environments, combining deep architectural specialism with the commercial and leadership skills to shape and grow our practice. This is a role for someone who thrives at the intersection of client advisory, AI platform architecture and hands-on delivery leadership — and who has a genuine passion for bringing AI systems to production at scale.

What you will be doing

As a Senior Manager and AI Architect, you will own and lead the architecture of complex AI programmes end-to-end — from shaping the opportunity and winning the work, through solution design, delivery governance and team leadership. You will bring SME-level depth in enterprise AI architecture and apply it to create real, lasting value for our clients.

Although we do not expect you to be an expert in every technology listed below simultaneously, our team consists of people who can advise clients as well as bring deep technical knowledge when needed. Key responsibilities span the following areas.

Engagement & delivery leadership

• Own and lead the architecture of complex AI and data transformation engagements, taking accountability for solution design, quality, technical risk and client outcomes.

• Lead and resource multi-disciplinary delivery teams — architects, engineers, data scientists and consultants — providing clear direction, technical oversight and people development.

• Manage engagement resourcing: forecast team requirements, work with practice leadership to staff engagements, and develop the talent pipeline through mentoring of junior practitioners.

• Proactively identify and manage delivery and architectural risks in complex stakeholder environments, escalating appropriately and maintaining client confidence throughout.

• Communicate clearly to both technical teams and senior client stakeholders, translating architectural complexity into actionable insight and decisive recommendation.

• Conduct rigorous architecture and design reviews and uphold engineering standards across every engagement you lead.

Stakeholder management & advisory

• Act as a trusted advisor to client architects, CTOs, CDAOs and engineering leads, earning trust through depth of knowledge and a demonstrable delivery track record.

• Build and maintain strong, senior client relationships, navigating competing priorities across business, technology and risk functions.

• Facilitate architecture workshops and decision forums, driving alignment across diverse stakeholder groups and securing buy-in for target-state designs.

• Translate business strategy into architectural roadmaps, sequencing investment and change in a way that balances ambition with deliverability.

Business development & bid support

• Play a leading role in business development: identifying new opportunities, shaping propositions, and supporting or leading bids and tender responses for AI and technology engagements.

• Contribute to proposal writing, articulating our capabilities and differentiators, including authoring technical and architecture sections of bid responses to client tenders and RFPs.

• Support practice-level growth initiatives, including account planning, capability development, and go-to-market positioning for AI architecture and solutions engineering services.

Technical architecture — what you will design

You will be the design authority for enterprise AI platforms, able to reason across the full stack and make credible technology selections. We expect expert-level depth in several of the areas below and working knowledge across the rest.

AI platform & cloud architecture

• Architect AI and Data Platforms using a mix of technologies including Databricks, Snowflake, Claude Enterprise and the native services of Azure, AWS and GCP - selecting the right tool for the workload rather than defaulting to a single vendor.

• Design for scalability, security, cost efficiency and multi-cloud / hybrid patterns, with a strong grasp of containerisation, infrastructure-as-code, event-driven architectures and CI/CD.

• Balance technical excellence with delivery pragmatism and commercial realities, championing the path from prototype to production.

Enterprise AI ecosystem integration

• Bring awareness of the broader enterprise landscape and how AI integrates with core operational systems such as SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow and other systems of record and engagement.

• Design integration patterns that let AI capabilities interoperate safely with enterprise data, identity, workflow and process automation platforms – including MCP and A2A and how these capabilities enable an enterprise Agent mesh.

• Understand the data, governance and change implications of embedding AI into mission-critical enterprise processes.

Orchestration & control plane

• Architect the orchestration and control-plane layer that governs how AI capabilities are exposed, routed and managed across the enterprise.

• Design MCP, AI and LLM gateway layers for secure, observable and policy-controlled access to models and tools.

• Design agent and skills registries — including recommending suitable technologies and patterns — to enable discovery, reuse and governance of agentic capabilities.

• Define the control plane for routing, rate limiting, cost management, model selection and version control across multiple model providers.

AI solution design

• Design retrieval and reasoning architectures including RAG, corrective RAG (CRAG), and agentic patterns, selecting the right approach for a given business problem.

• Architect agent harnesses and their components — planning, memory, tool use, state management and multi-agent coordination.

• Design prompt strategies, context management and grounding approaches for reliable, production-grade LLM behaviour.

Evaluation, guardrails & responsible AI

• Design evaluation frameworks and guardrails that make AI systems safe, reliable and measurable — covering accuracy, safety, bias, and task success.

• Embed responsible-AI and governance controls aligned to emerging regulation and client risk appetites.

• Define human-in-the-loop and fallback strategies for high-stakes use cases.

Observability & operations

• Architect logging, monitoring, tracing and cost-observability across the AI stack, including model, agent and platform telemetry.

• Design for drift detection, performance monitoring and continuous evaluation in production (LLMOps / MLOps).

• Establish operational patterns for reliability, incident response and lifecycle management of AI systems at scale.

Your skills and experience

We're seeking a technically credible, commercially aware leader who brings a rare combination of architectural depth, delivery accountability and client advisory skill — someone energised by the complexity of taking AI solutions to production at scale.

• 7+ years in technology consulting, architecture or AI/ML engineering, with at least 3 years in a senior leadership or lead-architect role — including accountability for end-to-end solution design, resourcing and commercial outcomes.

• Proven ability to architect enterprise AI platforms across a mix of technologies (Databricks, Snowflake, Azure, AWS, GCP) with strong design capability across cloud, data and AI domains.

• Working understanding of how AI integrates with major operational systems such as SAP, Salesforce and ServiceNow.

• Hands-on knowledge of agentic AI, LLM gateways, MCP, RAG/CRAG, agent harnesses, evaluations and guardrails, and AI observability.

• Demonstrable experience designing and leading data & AI transformation programmes, and building high-performing teams in complex stakeholder environments — engaging comfortably at CTO, CDAO or engineering-director level.

• Track record of supporting or leading bid and proposal activity, including writing technical and architecture sections of responses to tenders and RFPs.

• A clear, confident communicator able to make the complex accessible for technical and non-technical audiences alike.

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Data Science or a related discipline, or equivalent depth through relevant certifications (e.g. AWS Solutions Architect Professional, Google Professional ML Engineer, Databricks / Azure / GCP architecture credentials).

Industry experience

We would particularly like to hear from people who have designed and led data & AI transformation programmes across one or more of the following sectors:

• Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)

• Retail

• Pharmaceuticals & Life Sciences

• Manufacturing

• Financial Services

• Government and Public Services

Prior experience as an embedded or forward-deployed architect within a client environment, and exposure to regulated industries would be desired.

What a career at Baringa will give you

Putting   People   First.

Baringa is a People First company and wellbeing is at the forefront of our culture. We recognise the importance of work-life balance and flexible working and provide our staff amazing benefits. Some of these benefits include:

• Generous Annual Leave Policy:  We recognise everyone needs a well-deserved break. We provide our employees with 5 weeks of annual leave, fully available at the start of each year. In addition to this, we have introduced our 5-Year Recharge benefit which allows all employees an additional 2 weeks of paid leave after 5 years continuous service.

• Flexible Working:  We know that the ‘ideal’ work-life balance will vary from person to person and change at different stages of our working lives. To accommodate this, we have implemented a hybrid working policy and introduced more flexibility around taking unpaid leave.

• Corporate Responsibility Days:  Our world is important to us, so all our employees get 3 every year to help social and environmental causes and increase our impact on the communities that mean the most to us.

• Wellbeing Fund:  We want to encourage all employees to take charge and prioritise their own wellbeing. We’ve introduced our annual People Fund to support this by offering every individual a fund to support and manage their wellbeing through an activity of their choice.

• Profit Share Scheme:  All employees participate in the Baringa Group Profit Share Scheme so everyone has a stake in the company’s success.

Diversity and Inclusion

We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We believe that creating an environment where everyone feels a sense of belonging is central to our culture and that diversity is paramount to driving creativity, innovation, and value for our clients and for our people.

An award-winning workplace

You can be a part of our ‘Great Place to Work’ – with our commitment to women and well-being in the workplace for all.  Click here  to see some of our recent awards and how we’ve achieved this.

Using business as a force for good.

We maintain high standards of environmental performance and transparency, which can be seen through our commitment to Net Zero with our SBTI-verified Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions reduction targets and our support of the Better Business Act. We report our progress publicly and ensure that we are also externally assessed and scored through

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