Solution Architect - AI

Role purpose

The Solution Architect – AI, designs and guide the delivery of secure, resilient and cost-effective technology solutions for products and features within an agile product backlog. The role provides technical leadership within the delivery pod, ensures alignment with HSBC’s technology strategy, roadmap, standards and policies, and supports the responsible adoption of AI and GenAI capabilities.

The Solution Architect collaborates with Product Owners, Platform and Portfolio Architects, and multidisciplinary pod members to make sound architectural decisions, manage risks and technical debt, and deliver solutions that meet business and customer needs

Main activities:

- Create and maintain solution designs for products, features and backlog stories throughout the agile delivery lifecycle.

- Translate business and technology requirements into scalable, resilient, secure and cost-effective solutions.

- Provide technical leadership within the pod and guide engineering, QA, DevOps, data and security colleagues.

- Evaluate and incorporate AI/GenAI capabilities, such as assistants, semantic search, classification, information extraction and intelligent automation.

- Apply AI architecture patterns including RAG, tool or function calling, orchestration, guardrails, caching and human-in-the-loop controls.

- Identify, assess and communicate architectural risks, issues and technical debt, including AI-related security, privacy, bias, explainability, compliance and cost risks.

- Collaborate with Platform and Portfolio Architects to evolve architectural strategy, roadmaps, reusable patterns and AI guardrails.

- Ensure completion of architectural governance, control framework and compliance deliverables, including AI risk assessments and model governance where applicable.

- Drive key technical trade-offs and resolve design-related issues promptly, considering resilience, security, quality, cost, latency and scalability.

- Embed AI testing, evaluation, monitoring, fallback arrangements, documentation and responsible use practices into the software development lifecycle

Requirements

- Strong solution architecture capability, with experience translating business requirements into practical technology designs.

- Practical knowledge of AI/ML and GenAI fundamentals, including prompting, embeddings, RAG, agents, fine-tuning and prompt engineering.

- Understanding of AI architecture patterns, orchestration, guardrails, continuous evaluation and human-in-the-loop processes.

- Familiarity with model APIs and frameworks such as Azure OpenAI/OpenAI API, Hugging Face, LangChain, LlamaIndex or equivalent technologies.

- Knowledge of vector search and retrieval technologies, including Azure AI Search, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, Pinecone or Weaviate.

- Understanding of MLOps/LLMOps practices, including model and dataset versioning, model registries, prompt management and experimentation tracking.

- Ability to define and assess AI quality measures, including accuracy, groundedness, toxicity, hallucination, latency and cost.

- Knowledge of AI security and privacy controls, including prompt-injection protection, data-loss prevention, PII handling, access control, redaction and content filtering.

- Experience applying security, privacy, responsible AI, data minimisation, retention, traceability and compliance principles to technology solutions.

- Strong collaboration, communication and technical leadership skills, with the ability to make decisions and guide delivery in an agile, multidisciplinary environment.

HSBC is an equal opportunity employer committed to building a culture where all employees are valued, respected and opinions count. We take pride in providing a workplace that fosters continuous professional development, flexible working and, opportunities to grow within an inclusive and diverse environment. We encourage applications from all suitably qualified persons irrespective of, but not limited to, their gender or genetic information, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, social status, medical care leave requirements, political affiliation, people with disabilities, color, national origin, veteran status, etc., We consider all applications based on merit and suitability to the role.