- Hourly: $60.00 - $120.00
- Expert
- Est. time:3 to 6 months, 30+ hrs/week
Stevens is a strategic advisory and technology firm that partners with companies on high-impact transformation and technology initiatives. We work directly with executive and technology leaders to solve complex problems, identify opportunities, and turn strategy into working solutions. We are looking for a highly experienced Enterprise AI Solutions Architect to support enterprise customer engagements on an hourly contract basis. Please read before applying This is a senior enterprise architecture role with a high bar for relevant experience. We are specifically looking for candidates who have worked within major U.S. enterprises, leading technology companies, established consulting firms, systems integrators, or comparable large-scale organizations. Experience consisting primarily of freelance projects, small startups, personal projects, or AI prototypes will not meet the requirements for this role. Candidates must: * Be a U.S. citizen and current U.S. resident. * Have substantial professional experience designing and delivering technology within large enterprise environments. * Have experience working directly with enterprise customers, stakeholders, or technology organizations. * Be able to participate in customer meetings during standard U.S. business hours. * Complete a technical architecture interview as part of our screening process. * Be prepared for Stevens to verify relevant employment history and professional experience before engagement. Please only apply if you meet these requirements. The Role Our engagements often sit at the intersection of business strategy, enterprise architecture, and emerging technology. We help customers identify where AI can create meaningful business value, determine what should actually be built, and provide the technical leadership needed to move from concept to production. This is not a salaried or full-time employment position. Architects work with Stevens on an hourly contract basis as project needs arise. Engagement scope and weekly hours may vary based on active customer projects. This is a senior, highly customer-facing role. You will work directly with customer technology leaders, engineering teams, and Stevens delivery teams to understand complex business problems, shape AI use cases, design solutions, guide proofs of concept, and establish the architecture required to take successful solutions into production. We are specifically looking for someone who understands enterprise application development and architecture, not simply AI models or cloud infrastructure. The model is one component of the system. You should be comfortable reasoning across applications, APIs, data, integrations, identity, security, cloud infrastructure, AI services, and production operations to design complete enterprise solutions. Your work may include * Leading technical discovery and architecture sessions with enterprise customers. * Translating business problems and AI opportunities into practical solution architectures and implementation plans. * Designing enterprise AI applications using LLMs, RAG, agents, tool use, structured and unstructured data, APIs, and modern cloud services. * Integrating AI capabilities into existing enterprise applications, data platforms, SaaS products, and business workflows. * Architecting solutions primarily within AWS, including Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker. * Evaluating models, platforms, frameworks, and architectural approaches against specific business and technical requirements. * Helping customers make build-vs-buy decisions across a rapidly evolving AI technology landscape. * Designing rapid proofs of concept while ensuring successful POCs have a realistic path to production. * Defining architecture across application services, APIs, data, model infrastructure, integrations, identity, observability, and cloud infrastructure. * Accounting for enterprise requirements including security, privacy, governance, scalability, reliability, performance, and cost. * Establishing appropriate approaches to AI evaluation, guardrails, monitoring, and production operations. * Working closely with engineers throughout implementation to ensure architectural decisions translate into high-quality working software. * Reviewing technical approaches, identifying risks, and helping engineering teams navigate architectural tradeoffs. * Presenting architecture recommendations and technical decisions to engineering teams, technology leaders, and senior customer stakeholders. This is not a role where you create an architecture diagram and hand it to someone else. We want architects who stay close to implementation, understand the consequences of their decisions, and can help a team navigate the difficult decisions that emerge as a solution gets built. You will have significant autonomy and ownership. A successful architect at Stevens can walk into an ambiguous problem, quickly understand the customer’s business and technology environment, identify the decisions that actually matter, develop a point of view, and confidently guide both the customer and delivery team toward a solution. Requirements * U.S. citizenship and current U.S. residency are required. * 7+ years of relevant professional experience across software architecture, solutions architecture, application development, engineering, or technical consulting. * Meaningful experience working within or delivering solutions for major U.S. enterprises, leading technology companies, established consulting firms, systems integrators, or comparable large-scale organizations. * Significant experience designing and delivering enterprise applications, platforms, or distributed systems. * Hands-on experience architecting and implementing generative AI applications beyond basic prototypes or isolated model integrations. * Experience taking applications or major technical initiatives from discovery and proof of concept through production. * Strong understanding of modern AI application patterns including RAG, agents, tool use, embeddings, vector search, model orchestration, evaluation, and guardrails. * Strong AWS architecture experience, including practical experience with Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker. * Experience working with commercial AI platforms and models including OpenAI and Anthropic Claude, along with familiarity with open-source models. * Strong understanding of modern application architecture, backend services, APIs, databases, data architecture, distributed systems, and enterprise integration patterns. * Experience integrating new applications and capabilities with existing enterprise systems and data sources. * Familiarity with cloud engineering, DevOps, MLOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and production observability. * Strong understanding of security, identity, privacy, governance, reliability, scalability, and cost considerations in production enterprise systems. * Ability to make pragmatic architectural decisions within complex existing technology environments where replacing everything and starting over is not an option. * Ability to move comfortably between conversations about business requirements and detailed technical architecture. * Experience leading technical discovery, architecture workshops, and customer-facing solution design. * Strong written and verbal communication skills. * Confidence presenting recommendations, defending architectural decisions, and challenging assumptions with senior technology and business stakeholders. * Availability during standard U.S. business hours for customer workshops, architecture sessions, and meetings as needed. Experience at organizations such as major technology companies, cloud providers, Fortune 500 enterprises, nationally recognized consulting firms, or large systems integrators is strongly valued. The company name itself is not the qualification; we care about whether you have actually operated in sophisticated enterprise technology environments and solved problems at meaningful scale. An active U.S. government security clearance is not required but is strongly valued. Additional compensation may be available for individuals who hold and maintain an active U.S. government security clearance. Our Screening Process We maintain a high technical and professional bar because architects in this role represent Stevens directly with enterprise customers. Qualified applicants should expect: 1. Resume and experience review, with particular attention to enterprise architecture and delivery experience. 2. Initial screening conversation focused on your background, customer-facing experience, and recent enterprise work. 3. Architecture interview in which you will be asked to reason through an enterprise technology scenario, make architectural decisions, discuss tradeoffs, and explain how you would take a solution from discovery toward production. 4. Employment and professional experience verification before engagement. Please make sure the employment history and experience described in your Upwork profile, resume, and proposal are accurate and verifiable. Working With Stevens At Stevens, you will have the opportunity to work on sophisticated enterprise AI initiatives across multiple industries, work directly with customer technology leaders and engineering organizations, own meaningful architectural decisions, and stay close enough to implementation to see the solutions you design actually get built. We are building Stevens around the idea that a small, highly capable team can do exceptional work for sophisticated customers without introducing the bureaucracy that often comes with traditional consulting. We value good judgment, technical excellence, clear communication, intellectual curiosity, and pragmatic decision-making. We want people willing to challenge unnecessary complexity, recognize when a simpler solution is better, and say when AI is not the right answer. If your background is in enterprise-scale technology architecture and delivery, and you enjoy solving difficult problems directly with customers, we would like to hear from you.