Solution Architect - AI Enterprise in Birmingham

We are actively building diverse teams and welcome applications from everyone.

Location: Birmingham (SCC operate hybrid working, which comprises of a mix of office and home working)

Contract Type: Permanent

Salary Package: competitive salary plus large company benefits, a broad flexible benefits scheme, and 2 paid-for volunteering days a year

Hours: 9.00 am – 5.30 pm Monday – Friday

Interview Process: 2-stage process

Why SCC?

• An inclusive workplace
• Excellent package: solid basic and company benefits
• Hybrid working & core hours in line with role requirements
• Career development and life-long learning opportunities
• Opportunity to join Europe's largest privately-owned IT Company

Role purpose: The Pre-Sales Architect (AI Infrastructure) leads technical discovery, solution design, and customer engagement for AI infrastructure opportunities—spanning GPU-accelerated servers, networking/fabrics, storage, and the software stack required to deploy and operate AI workloads (drivers, orchestration, cluster management, observability, and lifecycle services). You partner with account teams to qualify opportunities, shape requirements, create compelling architectures and proposals, and guide proof-of-concept and pilot activities through to a successful handoff for delivery. This role is equal parts technical depth and commercial impact: translating customer outcomes into feasible, supportable designs; articulating value, risk, and trade-offs; and enabling customers to achieve performance, reliability, and cost targets in real deployments. The role requires confidence in positioning secure, resilient, and scalable AI‑ready enterprise architectures.

Key responsibilities:

• Opportunity Qualification & Technical Discovery — Run structured discovery with customers and internal stakeholders to clarify AI workload goals (training/inference), constraints (space/power, procurement, security), success criteria, and buying process.
• Solution Architecture & Design — Produce end-to-end AI infrastructure architectures across compute, networking, storage, and software; define assumptions, sizing, resilience, and operability for target workloads.
• Workload Sizing & Performance Guidance — Translate model/workload requirements into practical sizing (GPU count, memory, interconnect, storage throughput), and explain performance trade-offs, scaling limits, and bottlenecks.
• Technical Proposal & Documentation — Create and review technical sections of proposals (SoW inputs, architecture diagrams/description, BOM guidance, risks/mitigations, acceptance criteria, and deployment approach) tailored to customer stakeholders.
• POCs, Pilots & Benchmarks — Plan and execute proof-of-concept and pilot activities (test plans, success metrics, benchmark methodology), troubleshoot issues with engineering/partners, and document outcomes.
• Customer Communication & Executive Readouts — Present architectures, value propositions, and trade-offs to technical and executive audiences; facilitate design reviews and decision check-points.
• Competitive Positioning & Field Enablement — Contribute to battlecards, reference architectures, and sales plays; help teams articulate differentiation (performance, time-to-value, TCO, supportability) in competitive deals.
• Handoff to Delivery & Customer Success — Ensure a clean transition from pre-sales to implementation with clear requirements, validated design, risks, and acceptance tests; stay engaged through early deployment to unblock issues.
• Deal Support & Governance — Support RFP/RFI responses, security and architecture reviews, and stakeholder alignment; maintain opportunity notes, solution assumptions, and decision logs to reduce execution risk.

Skills and experience:

• Experience in a customer-facing technical role (pre-sales architect, solutions architect, sales engineer, field engineer, technical consultant) supporting complex infrastructure or platform deals.
• Strong technical literacy across enterprise / AI infrastructure: GPU servers, interconnect concepts (PCIe/NVLink-class), networking fabrics (Ethernet/InfiniBand/RoCE), storage fundamentals, and Linux-based operations.
• Ability to translate business and workload goals into architectures, sizing, and trade-offs (performance, cost, power, reliability, security, and time-to-deploy) with clear assumptions and acceptance criteria.
• Consultative selling skills: comfortable leading technical conversations, influencing stakeholders, handling objections, and partnering with account teams to progress deals.
• Strong communication: can write high-quality solution documentation and present to both technical audiences (platform/infra teams) and executives (outcomes, risk, ROI/TCO, timelines).
• Experience coordinating across engineering, delivery, and partners/OEMs; able to drive alignment without authority and keep multiple workstreams moving during sales cycles.
• Curiosity and continuous learning in AI: keeping current on accelerator platforms, model trends, and how infrastructure choices impact training/inference performance and total cost of ownership.

Preferred:

• Hands-on experience with AI/HPC platforms (Kubernetes, Slurm, Ray) and familiarity with GPU software stacks (CUDA ecosystem concepts, drivers, container runtimes, libraries).
• Knowledge of networking for distributed training/inference (RDMA/RoCE concepts, topology awareness, congestion management, observability) and data pipeline/storage considerations.
• Experience building and delivering pre-sales assets: reference architectures, sizing guides, benchmark reports, TCO/ROI models, competitive battlecards, and technical workshop material.
• Exposure to enterprise requirements: security/compliance, on-prem deployment constraints, procurement processes, lifecycle support, and supply/lead-time realities for hardware-led solutions.
• Industry standard qualifications desirable. Vendor specific qualifications desirable.

SCC is Europe's largest privately-owned IT business, based out of the new £7m HQ office in Birmingham and we help clients succeed through IT transformation and exceptional customer experiences. We are a business where innovation is greater as we combine unique ideas, people and disciplines. We are a global company that is passionate about IT and where we look to simplify the complex. We are an equal opportunities employer SCC is committed to providing equal opportunities and a proactive and inclusive approach to equality and diversity in employment. No applicant or employee will be treated less favourably than another on the grounds of a protected characteristic which are defined as sex, sexual orientation, age, disability, gender reassignment, trade union membership or non-membership, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race and religion or belief.

If you are selected for interview, and need any reasonable adjustments made for your interview, please let the SCC Talent Acquisition team know, at the point of scheduling.