Senior Solution Architect

Location: Gurgaon

Grade: M3

Purpose & Overall Relevance For The Organization

Digital at adidas is a consumer facing organization growing at a tremendous rate. As part of Digital Data and AI Tech, you will shape how we leverage Large Language Models and agentic AI systems to transform digital experiences and supercharge our eCommerce ecosystem. As a Senior AI Architect, you will lead the design, development, and operationalization of LLM-powered and agentic AI applications that support millions of consumers.

You will collaborate with AI Engineers, LLM Engineers, Data Engineers, and Product Owners to build scalable, production-ready agentic AI platforms, enabling autonomous workflows, intelligent digital experiences, and next-generation consumer interactions.

Key Responsibilities

As a Senior AI Architect, responsibilities in the domain of AI and LLM applications include:

Architect, design, and deliver end-to-end agentic AI applications using LLMs, multi-agent workflows, and orchestration frameworks
Build scalable microservices and inference pipelines for LLMs and agentic systems, optimized for latency, cost, and availability
Define best practices for LLM architecture, including prompt engineering, model selection, evaluation (Evals), vector search, and RAG design patterns
Operationalize and monitor LLM applications using modern LLMOps/MLOps platforms covering evaluation, observability, experimentation, and safety guardrails.
Establish governance and design standards for responsible and secure use of LLMs and autonomous agents in production environments
Guide engineering teams through the design, development, and deployment of GenAI features across multiple consumer-facing products
Stay ahead of emerging technologies in LLMs, agent frameworks, orchestration systems, and AI reasoning engines and translate them into actionable architecture direction

Specialist advice

Actively maintains recognised expert level knowledge in one or more identifiable specialisms.
Provides definitive and expert advice in their specialist area(s).
Oversees the provision of specialist advice by others, consolidates expertise from multiple sources, including third party experts, to provide coherent advice to further organisational objectives.
Supports and promotes the development and sharing of specialist knowledge within the organisation.

Research

Within given research goals, builds on and refines appropriate outline ideas for research, including evaluation, development, demonstration, and implementation.
Applies standard methods to collect and analyse quantitative and qualitative data.
Creates research reports to communicate research methodology and findings and conclusions. Contributes sections of material of publication quality.
Uses available resources to update knowledge of any relevant field and curates a personal collection of relevant material.
Participates in research communities.

Emerging technology monitoring

Supports monitoring of the external environment and assessment of emerging technologies to evaluate the potential impacts, threats, and opportunities to the organisation.
Contributes to the creation of reports, technology road mapping and the sharing of knowledge and insights.

Solution architecture

Contributes to the development of solution architectures in specific business, infrastructure, or functional areas.
Identifies and evaluates alternative architectures and the trade-offs in cost, performance, and scalability.
Produces specifications of cloud-based or on-premises components, tiers, and interfaces, for translation into detailed designs using selected services and products.
Supports a change programme or project through the preparation of technical plans and application of design principles that comply with enterprise and solution architecture standards (including security).

Business analysis

Investigates operational needs and problems, and opportunities, contributing to the recommendation of improvements in automated and non-automated components of new or changed processes and organization.
Assists in defining acceptance tests for these recommendations.

Requirement's definition and management

Contributes to selection of the requirements approach for projects, selecting appropriately from predictive (plan-driven) approaches or adaptive (iterative/agile) approaches.
Defines and manages scoping, requirements definition and prioritisation activities for initiatives of medium size and complexity.
Facilitates input from stakeholders, provides constructive challenges and enables effective prioritization of requirements.
Reviews requirements for errors and omissions. Establishes the requirements baselines, obtains formal agreement to requirements, and ensures traceability to source.
Investigates, manages, and applies authorized requests for changes to base-lined requirements, in line with change management policy.

Systems design

Designs components using appropriate modelling techniques following agreed architectures, design standards, patterns, and methodology.
Identifies and evaluates alternative design options and trade-offs. Creates multiple design views to address the concerns of the different stakeholders of the architecture and to handle both functional and non-functional requirements.
Models, simulates or prototypes the behavior of proposed systems components to enable approval by stakeholders.
Produces detailed design specifications to form the basis for construction of systems.
Reviews, verifies, and improves own designs against specifications.

Software design

Designs software components and modules using appropriate modelling techniques following agreed software design standards, patterns, and methodology.
Creates and communicates multiple design views to identify and balance the concerns of all stakeholders of the software design and to allow for both functional and non-functional requirements.
Identifies and evaluates alternative design options and trade-offs. Recommends designs which considers target environment, performance security requirements and existing systems.
Reviews, verifies, and improves own designs against specifications. Leads reviews of others designs.
Models, simulates or prototypes the behaviour of proposed software to enable approval by stakeholders, and effective construction of the software.
Verifies software design by constructing and applying appropriate methods.

Programming/software development

Designs, codes, verifies, tests, documents, amends, and refactors complex programs/scripts and integration software services.
Contributes to selection of the software development approach for projects, selecting appropriately from predictive (plan-driven) approaches or adaptive (iterative/agile) approaches.
Applies agreed standards and tools, to achieve well-engineered outcomes.
Participates in reviews of own work and leads reviews of colleagues work.

Data modelling and design

Investigates corporate data requirements, and applies data analysis, design, modelling, and quality assurance techniques, to establish, modify or maintain data structures and their associated components (entity descriptions, relationship descriptions, attribute definitions).
Provides advice and guidance to database designers and others using the data structures and associated components.

Database design

Develops and maintains specialist knowledge of database and data warehouse concepts, design principles, architectures, software, and facilities.
Assesses proposed changes to object/data structures, to evaluate alternative options.
Implements physical database designs to support transactional data requirements for performance and availability.
Implements data warehouse designs that support demands for business intelligence and data analytics.

Systems integration and build

Provides technical expertise to enable the configuration of software, other system components and equipment for systems testing.
Collaborates with technical teams to develop and agree system integration plans and report on progress. Defines complex/new integration builds.
Ensures that integration test environments are correctly configured.
Designs, performs, and reports results of tests of the integration build.
Identifies and documents system integration components for recording in the configuration management system.
Recommends and implements improvements to processes and tools.

Relationship management

Implements stakeholder engagement/communications plan.
Deals with problems and issues, managing resolutions, corrective actions, lessons learned and the collection and dissemination of relevant information.
Collects and uses feedback from customers and stakeholders to help measure effectiveness of stakeholder management.
Helps develop and enhance customer and stakeholder relationships.

If required: People Management / Resource Management:

Is involved in recruiting process and proposes support for hiring decision and pre-selection of candidates
Allocate the different work to the respective employees considering experience, complexity, workload, and organizational efficiency
Continuously monitors and evaluates team workload and organizational efficiency with the support of IT systems, data and analysis and team feedback and makes appropriate changes to meet business needs.
Provides team members/direct reports with clear direction and targets that are aligned with business needs and GIT objectives

Key Relationships

Global IT
Respective business function (GOPS (Global Operations), Finance, HR, Brand Marketing, Wholesale/Retail)
HR Management
Controlling

Requisite Education And Experience / Minimum Qualifications

7+ years of experience as a senior / principal architect or engineering leader
Strong experience building applications using LLMs, GenAI APIs, vector databases, orchestration frameworks, and agentic AI systems
Solid background in software engineering (Python/Scala), backend development, and cloud-native system design
Experience implementing:
LLM-powered applications (chatbots, copilots, content generation, automation agents)
Agentic workflows (e.g., planning, tool use, multi-agent coordination)
RAG pipelines and vector search
Deep understanding of LLMOps: evaluation, monitoring, safety guardrails, prompt lifecycle management, and model deployment
Experience with AWS data/AI services, IaC, container orchestration, and modern DevOps practices
Ability to collaborate with product, engineering, and design teams to deliver production-ready AI features
AWS Solution Architect or Machine Learning Specialty certification is a plus

At adidas, we're keen to increase our team's diversity of backgrounds and skills, and we're more interested in the work you will produce than that work you've already produced in the past. If you'd love to work with us, then we'd love to hear from you.

We Are Rebellious Optimists Driven By Action; We See Possibilities Where Others Only See The Impossible. Curious To Know How We Do Things Checkout Our Developer Portal And Engineering Blog

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adidas celebrates diversity, supports inclusiveness and encourages individual expression in our workplace. We do not tolerate the harassment or discrimination toward any of our applicants or employees. We are an equal opportunity employer.

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