Senior Data & AI Solution Architect

Manulife•Toronto, ON

1d•CA$113,000 - CA$163,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Senior Data & AI Solution Architect is accountable for designing and governing end-to-end data and AI solutions that translate business requirements into secure, scalable, and production-ready architectures. This role operates as the hands-on architecture authority across the solution lifecycle, driving design decisions, defining solution blueprints, resolving trade-offs, and guiding engineering and data science teams through implementation. The architect ensures solutions are aligned with enterprise standards, regulatory expectations, and operational readiness, while enabling the delivery of modern data platforms, analytics, and AI/GenAI use cases.

Requirements

5+ years of experience in data/analytics architecture, with 3+ years designing AI/ML solutions in production (GenAI experience strongly preferred).
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data/AI, or a related field. Master’s degree preferred.
Proven experience architecting on Azure across data and AI services (e.g., Data Lake/Databricks/Synapse/Fabric as applicable; Azure AI services), ideally within financial services and/or insurance.
Strong understanding of data governance, data modeling, integration, metadata management, and privacy/security controls; able to extend these practices to AI/GenAI governance.
Strong architecture leadership skills: drive decisions, manage trade-offs, and influence across teams while maintaining delivery focus.
Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to translate complex data/AI concepts for technical and non-technical audiences.
Experience with modern engineering practices (IaC, CI/CD), and with MLOps/LLMOps concepts such as model/prompt versioning, evaluation, monitoring, and deployment patterns.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience implementing: RAG architectures, Vector databases / semantic search, Prompt orchestration frameworks
Experience with: Lakehouse architectures and data products, Domain-driven/data mesh environments
Familiarity with: Model risk management, Responsible AI frameworks in regulated industries
Azure certifications (Solutions Architect, Data Engineer, AI Engineer).
Relevant certifications in Azure (Architecture/Data/AI) are a plus.

Responsibilities

Design end-to-end data and AI solutions (data pipelines, analytics, ML/GenAI use cases).
Produce HLDs/LLDs, define NFRs (scalability, performance, security, cost).
Lead design decisions and trade-offs (e.g., batch vs streaming, cost vs performance).
Review and approve solution designs aligned with enterprise standards.
Guide engineering and data science teams during build and deployment.
Resolve technical blockers and ensure production readiness.
Implement patterns for ingestion, lakehouse, ML pipelines, and GenAI (RAG, vector search).
Enforce MLOps/LLMOps (versioning, evaluation, monitoring).
Architect solutions leveraging Azure (ADLS, Databricks, Synapse/Fabric, Azure ML/OpenAI).
Define CI/CD and IaC-based deployment patterns.
Design API, data contracts, and event-driven architectures.
Ensure data quality, lineage, and interoperability.
Embed security, privacy, and AI governance controls (model risk, guardrails).
Define monitoring, observability, and cost optimization strategies.