Senior Solutions Architect (VMware & AI Platform)📣 Job Ad

About Rackspace Technology and the Role

Rackspace Technology is a leading end-to-end hybrid cloud and AI solutions company, designing, building, and operating customer cloud and AI environments across all major technology platforms. Recognised by Glassdoor, Newsweek, and Forbes as a best place to work, the company is seeking a Senior Solutions Architect (VMware & AI Platform) for a full-time position in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Role Overview

This presales-focused role supports strategic sales opportunities across the Middle East region. The Senior Solutions Architect will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions, and Delivery teams to design innovative solutions addressing customer requirements in datacentre modernisation, virtualisation, hybrid cloud, disaster recovery, business continuity, and platform transformation. The role increasingly extends to architecting enterprise AI platforms, including GPU-as-a-Service (GPUaaS), model inference, and fine-tuning capabilities, which run above the hypervisor layer, orchestrated through Kubernetes and integrated with VMware, while ensuring robust guardrails, resilience, and security controls. As a senior technical leader, this role acts as a trusted advisor to customers and a recognised subject matter expert within Rackspace for VMware, infrastructure modernisation, and AI platform solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop trusted relationships with client executives and technical stakeholders, acting as both a business and technical advisor.
• Lead customer workshops focused on VMware technologies, private cloud adoption, datacentre modernisation, hybrid cloud architectures, AI platform strategy, and platform transformation.
• Design and position solutions leveraging VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), vSphere, NSX, VMware Aria Suite, Tanzu, and complementary technologies.
• Design and position AI platform solutions that layer GPUaaS, model serving/inference, and fine-tuning workloads above the hypervisor, such as VMware Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA on VCF, NVIDIA vGPU and Multi-Instance GPU (MIG) partitioning, and AMD Instinct accelerators, orchestrated through Kubernetes (VMware Tanzu / TKG).
• Architect the AI serving and training stack above the platform layer, including inference servers and MLOps tooling (*, NVIDIA Triton, KServe, Ray, Kubeflow), GPU scheduling and multi-tenancy, model registries, and CI/CD pipelines for models.
• Embed AI guardrails and governance into platform designs, covering policy enforcement, content and prompt filtering, PII/data-loss controls, RAG safety patterns, and alignment with responsible-AI and regulatory frameworks (*, ISO/IEC 42001, EU AI Act, NCSC guidance) relevant to regulated and sovereign customers.
• Design for resilience across the full stack, including high availability, fault tolerance, backup, disaster recovery, GPU node-pool failover, training checkpointing, and continuity for stateful inference and data services.
• Design for security and tenant isolation across the AI platform, encompassing network micro-segmentation (NSX), confidential computing, encryption of models and data in transit and at rest, secure model and container supply chains, secrets management, and identity/access controls.
• Assess customer requirements and develop solution architectures that address current and future business objectives across both traditional infrastructure and AI workloads.
• Lead complex presales engagements, coordinating with Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), Product Management, Sales, and Delivery teams.
• Produce high-quality proposals, RFI/RFP responses, bids, and Statements of Work (SoWs) that clearly articulate customer requirements, solution designs, project scope, and delivery effort.
• Provide specialist guidance on VMware platforms, AI infrastructure, migration strategies, infrastructure transformation, and hybrid cloud adoption.
• Anticipate and address technical and commercial objections, reducing customer risk and increasing confidence in Rackspace solutions.
• Advise customers on infrastructure operations, AI platform operations, platform governance, cloud strategy, and transformation roadmaps.
• Estimate project effort, resource requirements, and delivery approaches using Agile, Waterfall, or hybrid methodologies.
• Maintain accurate pipeline, opportunity, and customer engagement information within Salesforce.
• Contribute to the development of the wider solutions organisation through mentoring, knowledge sharing, and technical leadership.
• Maintain deep expertise in VMware and AI platform technologies and stay current with industry developments and market trends.

Required 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, including 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 and multi-tenancy, GPU virtualisation and partitioning (NVIDIA vGPU/MIG, GPU passthrough), and accelerator options across NVIDIA and AMD Instinct.
• Working knowledge of the inference and fine-tuning stack, covering model serving and inference optimisation (throughput, latency, batching), fine-tuning and training workflows, and supporting MLOps tooling (*, Triton, KServe, Ray, Kubeflow).
• Strong knowledge of Kubernetes and container platforms, particularly VMware Tanzu / TKG, as the orchestration layer 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, including 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 resilience patterns specific to GPU and stateful AI workloads.
• Understanding of platform security and tenant isolation, including network micro-segmentation, confidential computing, model and data encryption, secure model/container supply chains, and identity and access management.
• Familiarity with infrastructure automation and orchestration tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Aria Automation, or similar technologies.
• Demonstrated success solving complex technical challenges within enterprise VMware, virtualisation, hybrid cloud, or AI platform environments.
• Strong commercial awareness and the 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.

Attributes for Success

Success in this role involves becoming a recognized expert within Rackspace for VMware, Infrastructure Modernisation, and AI Platform solutions. It includes driving successful solution outcomes for complex enterprise customers across both traditional infrastructure and AI platform engagements. A key measure of success is designing AI platforms that are trusted, resilient, and secure by default, enabling customers to adopt GPUaaS, inference, and fine-tuning with confidence, particularly in regulated and sovereign contexts. The role influences strategic technology decisions and transformation programmes, helping customers modernise their infrastructure and adopt AI while accelerating their cloud and digital transformation journeys, ultimately enabling sustained revenue growth through technical leadership, innovation, and trusted advisory relationships.

Location and Work Type

This is a full-time position based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.