Senior Solutions Architect (AI)

ILS Inc. is seeking a Senior Solutions Architect (AI) to support a federal IT modernization initiative. The successful candidate will design, evaluate, and guide the implementation of AI/ML solutions. The role requires balancing technical feasibility, performance, cost, and integration complexity while collaborating across business and technical teams to deliver secure and resilient solutions. This hybrid role requires in-office presence two days per week in Fairfax, VA. 

MUST BE LOCAL TO DC METRO AREA (hybrid support - 2 days in ILS HQ office, located in Fairfax, VA 22033).

Must be able to be W2 employee; no C2C.

• Gather and analyze business and technical requirements, focusing on pain points in existing validation processes.
• Develop end-to-end architecture covering intake, validation engines, confidence scoring, transactional versioning, rollback strategies, and downstream event publishing.
• Comparing solution options, such as:
• Machine Learning (ML): anomaly detection, structured validation, confidence scoring.
• Large Language Models (LLM): text normalization, semantic validation, external enrichment.
• Hybrid Models: layered pipelines integrating rules, ML, and LLMs.
• Collaborate with Solution Architects, developers and stakeholders to ensure architectural alignment with modernization goals.
• Deliver architecture documentation, diagrams, and recommendations to guide implementation teams.

Required skill sets - Extensive experience with:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Science, or a related technical field.
• 8+ years of experience in solution architecture, with at least 2+ years in AI/ML system design or deployment.
• Strong knowledge of AI/ML model design, data pipelines, and system integration patterns.
• Familiarity with LLM applications for unstructured data normalization, semantic analysis, and enrichment.
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS preferred), containerized deployments, and event-driven architecture.
• Hands-on experience designing and integrating solutions in Java and developing REST-based services within enterprise or cloud environments.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to present architectural concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Skills 

• Experience on federal government IT modernization projects.
• Knowledge of compliance and security frameworks (e.g., FISMA, FedRAMP, NIST).
• Hands-on expertise with AWS AI/ML services (SageMaker, Comprehend, Bedrock, etc.).
• Familiarity with Oracle Service Bus and Informatica, including their use in large-scale data integration and enterprise service-oriented architectures.