VP, AI Solutions Architect

About the role

Dentsu's Merkle brand is looking for a hands-on AI Solutions Architect at Vice President level to join the Office of the CTO. As a founding member of a new AI Solutions team, you will personally design, code, prototype and deploy AI solutions that solve real business problems, while shaping architecture, platform and engineering standards. Reporting to the SVP, AI Solutions, you combine the implementation depth of a senior individual contributor with the judgment to advise enterprise clients. The role is full-time, based in the US with hybrid options (3 days in the office) in New York, Chicago or Detroit, and 30-40% travel.

Key responsibilities

• Build and ship AI solutions: implement AI applications and agentic workflows, including code, orchestration, APIs, data integrations and deployment pipelines.
• Take solutions from discovery and prototyping through production deployment, monitoring and iteration, with client and internal engineering teams.
• Integrate AI services with enterprise systems via APIs, event-driven patterns and Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Apply LLMs, RAG, agent orchestration and other AI techniques to areas such as customer service, marketing personalization and analytics automation.
• Write tests, build evaluation datasets, implement observability and debug failures.
• Design scalable, secure and reliable architectures, make tradeoffs across models, frameworks and cloud services, and turn implementations into reusable components and reference architectures.
• Help evolve Merkle's AI platform and integrate partner technologies such as Salesforce, Adobe, Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud, Databricks and Snowflake.
• Run technical discovery with clients, build prototypes, run workshops and hackathons, mentor architects and engineers, and support sales with technical solution design and demos.

Required profile

• 12+ years of progressive experience in software engineering, solution architecture, enterprise architecture or technical consulting, including at least 3 years designing and delivering production generative AI/LLM systems.
• Recent, substantial hands-on coding experience, able to implement and debug significant parts of a solution.
• Concrete examples of AI systems you personally built and shipped, with clear explanation of your contribution and architecture.
• Experience building agentic systems with frameworks such as LangGraph, Microsoft Agent Framework, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK or CrewAI.
• Experience with LLM evaluation, observability, RAG and vector search patterns.
• Strong software engineering foundations: API design, data integration, cloud deployment, containers, automated testing and CI/CD.
• Ability to turn ambiguous business goals into working software and communicate tradeoffs clearly.
• Desire to stay an active individual contributor while providing senior technical leadership.

Required skills

• Proficiency in one or more languages such as Python, TypeScript/JavaScript, C# or Java.
• Preferred: experience deploying on managed cloud AI and agent platforms (Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud) and integrating with marketing, commerce or data platforms (Adobe Experience Cloud, Salesforce, Braze, Shopify, Marketplacer, Databricks, Snowflake).
• Preferred: full-stack development, classical ML (PyTorch, MLOps), and experience mentoring senior engineers.

What we offer

• Annual base salary range of $163,000 - $263,062, with eligibility for discretionary incentive compensation.
• Medical, vision and dental insurance, life insurance, and short- and long-term disability insurance.
• 401k, flexible paid time off, at least 15 paid holidays per year, paid sick and safe leave, and paid parental leave.