Cloud Architect (AI Technology)

At VML, we are a beacon of innovation and growth in an ever-evolving world. Our heritage is built upon a century of combined expertise, where creativity meets technology, and diverse perspectives ignite inspiration. With the merger of VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson, we have forged a new path as a growth partner that is part creative agency, part consultancy, and part technology powerhouse. Our global family now encompasses over 30,000 employees across 150+ offices in 64 markets, each contributing to a culture that values connection, belonging, and the power of differences.

Our expertise spans the entire customer journey, offering deep insights in communications, commerce, consultancy, CRM, CX, data, production, and technology. We deliver end-to-end solutions that result in revolutionary work.

The opportunity: You will be responsible for creating enterprise-quality AI, ML, and Data Science based solutions. You will be involved in technology selection, API design, and establishing core patterns within our products and client projects. You will consider the functional and non-functional requirements to inform these decisions and lead our development team in implementing them. You will work with our world class Data Science and Data Engineering teams to provide robust, high quality, performant cloud based solutions for our customers. This is not a role for someone who doesn’t love development. Our technical architects are expected to prove solutions and contribute to the development team, as well as reviewing code and driving improvement to our development practice and processes. At the same time, you need to be a great communicator: the role includes direct interaction with our clients and business stakeholders, which are a mixture of technical and non-technical audiences.

The world of AI is evolving at a staggering pace, and we keep our knowledge fresh by continually looking for fresh technologies and sharing what we’ve learned. As an architect you would be expected to exemplify this both by bringing new ideas to our projects, but also listening to and assessing ideas from the team.

What you’ll be doing:

• Creating enterprise-quality solutions, with extensive experience and familiarity with how enterprise software solutions fit into a wider technical landscape
• Creating serverless solutions to execute data science and ML models
• Guiding a team of Optimisers, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Cloud Engineers and QA Engineers.
• Understanding and relating customer/business needs to the technical solutions we create
• Liaising with the customer, product owners and business analysts to ensure that the work we are doing is correct and architecturally sound
• Making technology and approach choices to meet NFRs whilst delivering good value for money

What we want from you:

• Having an excellent understanding of Java, Typescript and/or Python, currently our core cloud languages
• Industry experience with an Infrastructure-as-Code platform (e.g. Cloudformation, Terraform)
• A strong understanding of both serverless development and containerisation approaches to deploying software to the cloud
• Having in-depth knowledge of at least one cloud platform (e.g. GCP, AWS, Azure), including an understanding of appropriate technologies for a given use case.
• Experience writing enterprise quality solutions, with extensive experience and familiarity with how enterprise software solutions fit into a wider technical landscape
• Having a solid understanding of traditional Design Patterns and the ability to adapt these to the AI world
• Being a strong proponent for rigorous quality processes, automated testing and IaC principles
• Having excellent written, spoken and diagrammatic communication skills, with the ability to convey technical and abstract principles to technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience of creating robust CI/CD pipelines that fully automate testing and release processes

If you know some of this, even better:

• A strong understanding of event-driven architectures
• Working knowledge of Rust
• Experience with or knowledge of data engineering platforms and principles
• Experience with or knowledge of data science platforms and technologies

What we can offer you: Alongside the opportunity to work with some of the most exciting brands around the world, we’ll also prioritise your career development and help you grow your skills. We’ll empower you to make a difference, allow you to be yourself, and respect who you are.

• Opportunity to work at the forefront of AI technology
• A chance to contribute to groundbreaking commerce AI solutions
• Remote working and much more!

Satalia, a VML Enterprise Solutions Company, is a community of individuals devoted to working on diverse and challenging projects, allowing you to flex your technical skills whilst working with a tight knit team of high performing colleagues. As an organisation, we push the boundaries of data science, optimisation and artificial intelligence to solve the most complex problems in industry. We build technologies that radically improve the operational efficiency, customer and employee satisfaction of our clients. We do this through product development and bespoke AI services.

Led by our founder (who is also WPP’s Chief AI Officer), Satalia’s ambition is to become a decentralised organisation of the future. Today this involves developing tools and processes to liberate and automate manual repetitive tasks, with a focus on freedom, transparency and trust. At the core of our thinking is an approach to wellbeing and inclusivity. We unpack human behaviour and unpick prejudice to ensure a safe and inviting environment. We offer true flexible working and allow our employees to find the working practice that makes them most productive. At Satalia, your opinion matters and your achievements are celebrated. We’re using technology, and concepts like organisational swarms and decentralisation to redesign how organisations operate. Using ourselves as a testbed, we’re building the foundations for a new, more effective organisational structure that anyone can use. We are investing massively in developing next generation generative AI tools, including workstreams covering text, image, video, audio, and research. We are building large scale, enterprise grade solutions and serving these innovations to our clients and WPP agency partners.

WPP (VML Enterprise Solutions) is an equal opportunity employer and considers applicants for all positions without discrimination or regard to characteristics. We are committed to fostering a culture of respect in which everyone feels they belong and has the same opportunities to progress in their careers.