Solutions Architect

About the role

As a Solutions Architect at Ascendance Foundry, you will lead technical client engagements end-to-end - from pre-sales discovery and architecture design through delivery, deployment, and iteration. You will sit at the intersection of engineering, product, and client strategy.

You will work directly with senior leaders at client organizations to identify problems, design custom AI-enabled solutions, scope and architect applications, and oversee implementation by a team that includes Ascendance Fellows and full-time developers.

This is a highly entrepreneurial role with significant autonomy and the opportunity to shape both client outcomes and AF’s internal methodologies as we scale.

Key Responsibilities

Support Client Engagements End-to-End

• Own technical discovery, solution design, architecture, and delivery for client projects.

• Run pre-sales scoping sessions to understand client workflows, data sources, constraints, and success metrics.

• Translate ambiguous business problems into clear technical plans, prototypes, and implementation roadmaps.

• Analyze client data sources (APIs, SQL, CSV, logs, emissions data, financial data, engineering systems) to extract insights and uncover opportunities for automation.

• Build prototypes, demos, and proofs-of-concept to illustrate solution value and accelerate adoption.

• Communicate the technical solution in business terms - ROI, operational impact, and future scaling opportunities.

Architect and Build AI-Enabled Solutions

• Design system architectures, data flows, integration layers, and application functionality across cloud, LLM, and analytics stacks.

• Guide implementation by Fellows and engineers; contribute code when needed to unblock or accelerate development.

• Conduct technical workshops with client teams to align on design, data availability, and deployment requirements.

Mentor and Develop Ascendance Fellows

• Provide day-to-day direction, code review, and technical coaching to Fellows working on client projects.

• Help elevate Fellows’ skills in software engineering, Python, LLM applications, data modeling, and cloud deployment.

• Ensure clients receive polished, production-ready outputs while creating a best-in-class apprenticeship environment.

What you’ll bring

Mindset

• Growth mindset and a passion for continuous learning.

• First-principles thinking.

• Comfort navigating ambiguity.

• Fast clock speed. You can reason through problems, make decisions and execute quickly.

• Ability to simplify complex systems into clean, explainable frameworks and communicate them clearly to clients, some of whom will not have high technical proficiency.

Technical Skills

• Strong proficiency in Python and common data science/engineering packages (Pandas, NumPy, SQLAlchemy, FastAPI/Flask, etc.).

• Experience with cloud platforms (Google Cloud preferred; AWS/Azure also relevant).

• Familiarity with modern AI tooling (LLM APIs, vector stores, RAG, embeddings, prompt engineering).

• Experience integrating disparate data sources via SQL, APIs, CSV ingestion pipelines, or third-party integrations.

Experience

• 1–5 years in a technical role such as Solutions Architect, Forward-Deployed Engineer, Data/AI Consultant, Full-Stack Engineer, or similar.

• Proven track record of leading technical projects and working directly with customers or internal stakeholders.

• Experience mentoring junior developers or leading small project teams.

Why you’ll love it here

• Work directly with top founders, CTOs, and domain experts.

• Autonomy to architect and ship meaningful solutions that go into production - not theoretical exercises.

• Opportunity to mentor some of Canada’s top young engineering talent.

• Exposure to diverse industries (energy, agriculture, finance, biotech, real estate, BPO automation).

• A fast-moving, low-bureaucracy environment where ideas turn into products quickly.