Senior Solutions Architect (VMware & AI Platform)

About Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology™ is a hybrid cloud and AI solutions company that designs, builds, and operates cloud and AI environments for customers across major technology platforms. The company supports application modernisation, AI adoption, innovation, and business transformation. Rackspace Technology has been recognised as a leading workplace by Glassdoor, Newsweek, and Forbes.

The Role of Senior Solutions Architect (VMware & AI Platform)

Rackspace Technology is seeking a Senior Solutions Architect with expertise in VMware technologies, infrastructure modernisation, and AI platform enablement. This full-time, presales-focused role is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and supports strategic sales opportunities across the Middle East. The architect will collaborate with Sales, Solutions, and Delivery teams to design solutions addressing customer requirements in datacentre modernisation, virtualisation, hybrid cloud, disaster recovery, business continuity, and platform transformation, including enterprise AI platforms. This involves architecting GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), model inference, and fine-tuning capabilities, orchestrated through Kubernetes and integrated with VMware, while ensuring necessary guardrails, resilience, and security controls. The role also involves acting as a trusted advisor to customers and becoming a subject matter expert within Rackspace for VMware, infrastructure modernisation, and AI platform solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop relationships with client executives and technical stakeholders, providing both business and technical advice.
• Lead customer workshops on VMware technologies, private cloud adoption, datacentre modernisation, hybrid cloud architectures, AI platform strategy, and platform transformation.
• Design and position solutions using VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), vSphere, NSX, VMware Aria Suite, Tanzu, and complementary technologies.
• Design and position AI platform solutions, including GPUaaS, model serving/inference, and fine-tuning workloads above the hypervisor, orchestrated through Kubernetes.
• Architect the AI serving and training stack, including inference servers, MLOps tooling, GPU scheduling, multi-tenancy, model registries, and CI/CD pipelines for models.
• Embed AI guardrails and governance into platform designs, covering policy enforcement, content/prompt filtering, PII/data-loss controls, RAG safety patterns, and alignment with responsible-AI and regulatory frameworks.
• Design for resilience across the full stack, including high availability, fault tolerance, backup, disaster recovery, GPU node-pool failover, and training checkpointing.
• Design for security and tenant isolation across the AI platform, including network micro-segmentation, confidential computing, encryption, secure model/container supply chains, secrets management, and identity/access controls.
• Assess customer requirements and develop solution architectures for traditional infrastructure and AI workloads.
• Lead complex presales engagements, coordinating with SMEs, Product Management, Sales, and Delivery teams.
• Produce high-quality proposals, RFI/RFP responses, bids, and Statements of Work (SoWs).
• Provide specialist guidance on VMware platforms, AI infrastructure, migration strategies, and hybrid cloud adoption.
• Identify buying signals, compelling events, key stakeholders, and potential barriers to sales.
• Address technical and commercial objections to reduce customer risk.
• Advise customers on infrastructure operations, AI platform operations, platform governance, and transformation roadmaps.
• Estimate project effort, resource requirements, and delivery approaches.
• Maintain accurate pipeline, opportunity, and customer engagement information.
• Contribute to the development of the solutions organisation through mentoring and knowledge sharing.
• Maintain expertise in VMware and AI platform technologies and stay current with industry trends.

Qualifications and Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or a related discipline; alternatively, 10+ years of relevant experience in technical presales, consulting, or solution architecture.
• Extensive experience designing enterprise infrastructure and VMware-based solutions.
• Strong understanding of datacentre and infrastructure modernisation strategies, including virtualisation, workload migration, consolidation, private cloud, and hybrid cloud adoption.
• Proven expertise across VMware technologies: VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), vSphere, vCenter, NSX, VMware Aria Operations and Automation, and VMware Tanzu.
• Practical understanding of AI platform architecture running above the hypervisor, including GPUaaS provisioning, multi-tenancy, GPU virtualisation, and accelerator options.
• Working knowledge of the inference and fine-tuning stack, including model serving, inference optimisation, fine-tuning/training workflows, and MLOps tooling.
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes and container platforms, particularly VMware Tanzu / TKG, for GPU-accelerated AI workloads.
• Understanding of AI guardrails and governance, including policy enforcement, content/prompt safety, data protection, and alignment with frameworks such as ISO/IEC 42001, the EU AI Act, and NCSC guidance.
• Strong knowledge of enterprise infrastructure architectures: compute, storage, networking, and security.
• Experience designing highly available, scalable, resilient, and secure virtualised and AI environments.
• Understanding of disaster recovery, backup, business continuity, and infrastructure resilience solutions, including patterns specific to GPU and stateful AI workloads.
• Understanding of platform security and tenant isolation, including network micro-segmentation, confidential computing, encryption, secure model/container supply chains, secrets management, and identity/access management.
• Familiarity with infrastructure automation and orchestration tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Aria Automation.
• Demonstrated success solving complex technical challenges within enterprise VMware, virtualisation, hybrid cloud, or AI platform environments.
• Strong commercial awareness and ability to navigate complex customer engagements and negotiations.
• Advanced understanding of industry trends relating to virtualisation, private cloud, hybrid cloud, AI infrastructure, and datacentre transformation.
• Experience using solutioning and presales tools, including Salesforce, proposal management, project scoping, and assessment frameworks.
• Exceptional communication, presentation, whiteboarding, analytical, and problem-solving skills.
• Strong organisational and time-management skills with the ability to balance multiple opportunities and strategic initiatives.

Expected Outcomes

• Become a recognised expert in VMware, Infrastructure Modernisation, and AI Platforms within Rackspace.
• Drive successful solution outcomes for complex enterprise customers across infrastructure and AI platform engagements.
• Design trusted, resilient, and secure AI platforms, enabling confident adoption of GPUaaS, inference, and fine-tuning, especially in regulated and sovereign contexts.
• Influence strategic technology decisions and transformation programmes.
• Support customers in modernising infrastructure and adopting AI, accelerating their cloud and digital transformation journeys.
• Enable sustained revenue growth through technical leadership, innovation, and trusted advisory relationships.