Senior AI Architect - Defense (m/w/d) in Köln

Introduction

A career in IBM Consulting is rooted by long-term relationships and close collaboration with clients across the globe.

You will work with visionaries across multiple industries to improve the hybrid cloud and AI journey for the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Your ability to accelerate impact and make meaningful change for your clients is enabled by our strategic partner ecosystem and our robust technology platforms across the IBM portfolio; including Software and Red Hat.

Curiosity and a constant quest for knowledge serve as the foundation to success in IBM Consulting. In your role, you will be encouraged to challenge the norm, investigate ideas outside of your role, and come up with creative solutions resulting in ground-breaking impact for a wide network of clients. Our culture of evolution and empathy centers on long-term career growth and development opportunities in an environment that embraces your unique skills and experience.

In this role, you will work in one of our IBM Consulting Client Innovation Centers (Delivery Centers), where we deliver deep technical and industry expertise to a wide range of public and private sector clients around the world. Our delivery centers offer our clients locally based skills and technical expertise to drive innovation and adoption of new technology.

In this role, you'll work in one of our IBM Consulting Client Innovation Centers (Delivery Centers), where we deliver deep technical and industry expertise to a wide range of public and private sector clients around the world. Our delivery centers offer our clients locally based skills and technical expertise to drive innovation and adoption of new technology.

Your role and responsibilities

As an Architect in IBM Consulting, you will serve as a leader in defining and implementing solutions for clients. You will be the advocate for the client while guiding the technical team to implementation.

You will collaborate with client stakeholders and internal partners to understand the business problem and requirements, constraints of the system and concerns of the various stakeholders to systematically transform detailed solutions (architectures) for the client.

As an AI Architect you are responsible for designing and implementing cognitive / AI solutions, which may run on multiple platforms and be composed of multiple software packages. You create the technical solution architecture for a given business problem and lead the development, integration, and testing of the solution. This requires a deep understanding of system engineering principles, cloud architectures, probabilistic and stochastic systems, system decomposition techniques, and the art of system synthesis using available cognitive / AI technology. As an AI Architect you must be familiar with commonly used technology suites and be able to select complementary analytics components for developing solution blueprints, accounting for performance architecture and engineering of a fully functional cognitive / AI system. You should have a thorough understanding of content formats, representations, data sources, content management systems, and interfaces to these. The goal is to cover the full information path from source to knowledge base and from input to processing the content in Cognitive Computing / AI solutions.

Required education

Bachelor's Degree

Preferred education

Master's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

• Strong fundamentals in Computer Science in connection with cognitive computing / artificial intelligence / machine learning, DevSecOps / AIOps.
• Experience in designing, evaluating and developing IT architectures which include AI solutions / components using industry-standard frameworks, generative AI, large language models and cloud-based tools and infrastructures.
• Experience in leveraging LLMs / generative / agentic AI for scalable and robust cognitive computing / AI solutions.
• Skills and expertise in
  • Containerization of applications, OpenShift architecture and administration incl. GPUs
  • GenAI and agentic AI architectures (RAG, agentic patterns, etc.)
  • DevSecOps / MLOps (e.g. CI/CD pipelines, ML lifecycle / deployment)
  • API design and integration
• Hands-on experience with Python for developing and deploying AI / ML models as well as AI / ML frameworks (e.g. PyTorch).
• Strong client-facing and consulting skills to shape AI-driven transformation strategies.
• Experience in leading technical project teams.
• Excellent verbal and written German (min. C1 level)
• Willingness to undergo a security clearance check (“Sicherheitsüberprüfung”)

Preferred technical and professional experience

• Experience in setting up hybrid / multi cloud environments (Kubernetes, Vanilla, OpenShift Container Platform).
• You have preferably knowledge and experience in working with clients in the Public area.