AI solutions architect

AI Solutions Architect Jobs: What the Role Is and Who's Hiring

There are 46 open AI solutions architect and field engineering roles across 15 companies tracked by the Agentic Ready Jobs Index, as of 12 June 2026 — and Databricks alone accounts for 19 of them, over 40% of the category. 34 of the 46 titles contain "architect", and 10 of the 46 postings (22%) are remote, against a 13% remote share across the full index.

Open roles75
Companies22
Remote share16%

What is an AI solutions architect?

An AI solutions architect is the technical design counterpart to a vendor's sales and delivery motion: the person who takes a customer's problem and a platform's capabilities and produces an architecture that honestly connects the two. Pre-sales, that means discovery calls, feasibility assessments, proofs of concept, and the reference architecture that turns "could this work" into a diagram the customer's engineers can interrogate. Post-sale, it means guiding the implementation at the design level — which models, what retrieval setup, where the agent's permissions stop — without becoming the team that writes the production code.

That last clause is the line between this role and the forward deployed engineer. A solutions architect designs and advises across a portfolio of accounts; a forward deployed engineer embeds in one customer and ships working software inside it. The dataset draws the same line: forward-deployed titles are classified under agent engineering because the job is hands-on building, while this category is architecture and solutions engineering. If you want to own the whiteboard and the customer relationship across many deployments, this is the role; if you want to write the code that goes live at one, look at the FDE guide. Many careers cross between the two.

The postings show where the demand actually is: platform vendors whose customers are trying to adopt AI. Databricks is hiring solutions architects for data and AI across the US, UK, Japan, India, Sweden, and Singapore — including eight retail and consumer-goods specialist roles. Cloudflare wants architects for its AI and developer platform; GitLab pairs AI with DevOps; Okta is hiring a "Solutions Architect, AI Identity"; Datadog wants a product solutions architect for LLM observability.

Skills and tools

Grounded in the 46 postings: deep fluency in one platform rather than shallow coverage of many — the openings are at Databricks (data and AI stack), Cloudflare (developer platform), GitLab (AI plus core DevOps, with one principal role wanting a DevOps subject-matter expert), Okta (identity), Elastic and MongoDB (search and data infrastructure), Datadog (LLM observability). Pre-sales mechanics appear explicitly in three titles (Stripe's "Solutions Architect, AI (Pre-sales)" and two Databricks pre-sales roles in Japan). Industry depth is a differentiator: eight Databricks roles target retail and CPG specifically. Language and region requirements are common — Thai-speaking for MongoDB in Malaysia, Kansai region for Databricks Japan — because the job is talking to customers where they are. Seniority concentrates at mid (27) and senior (15) with little room at the very top: one staff-plus role and three manager roles in the whole category.

How to break in

Two reliable routes. From engineering: builders who move customer-side — AI engineer, agent engineer, or forward deployed engineer backgrounds — arrive with the credibility the whiteboard requires, and need to add discovery and commercial judgement. From existing SA and sales engineering work: the platform skills transfer, and the AI-specific layer (model trade-offs, retrieval design, agent permissions, evals as an acceptance gate) is learnable faster than the customer craft it sits on. Databricks' 19 openings make it the obvious volume target; its specialist roles reward candidates who pair the platform with an industry, retail above all.

Adjacent roles: forward deployed engineer (delivery rather than design — the most common next move in either direction), AI product manager (many-customers pattern recognition feeds product roadmaps), agent ops engineer (the team that runs what you architect), AI security engineer (the permissions and identity design you sketch is their full-time job), and AI governance lead on the buyer's side of the table.

Skills appearing in real postings

Platform depthPre-sales discoveryProof-of-concept buildsReference architecturesRetrieval designAgent permissionsEvals as acceptance gatesIndustry specialisation

Hiring for this role right now

Live from the Agentic AI Jobs Index, updated 16 June 2026.

Salary

None of the 46 tracked postings discloses a range. The nearest public benchmark is the general title: levels.fyi reports a median solution architect package of $215,000 in the US across all companies and specialisations — not AI-specific, and skewed toward large vendors. Field roles often add variable compensation tied to the sales motion, which public medians understate.

Sources: levels.fyi — solution architect

Common questions

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between an AI solutions architect and a forward deployed engineer?

A solutions architect designs and advises across many accounts, mostly pre-sales and early post-sale, and does not own production code. A forward deployed engineer embeds with one customer and builds the working system. In this index the two are even classified apart — architects under field and solutions, FDEs under agent engineering — because the day-to-day work differs that much.

How many AI solutions architect jobs are open right now?

46 open roles across 15 companies, as of 12 June 2026, per the Agentic Ready Jobs Index. Databricks holds 19 of them; Decagon and Cloudflare are next with 5 each.

Are AI solutions architect jobs remote?

More often than most agentic roles: 10 of the 46 postings (22%) are remote, against a 13% index-wide share — GitLab's three openings are fully remote and several Databricks US roles are remote within named states. The trade-off is travel; field roles assume regular customer time regardless of where you live.

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