Alibaba Cloud Intelligence-Solutions Architect-EMEA Sports Segment

Job description

Role purpose:
Lead technical engagement for strategic accounts, working with customers, sales teams and partners to turn business priorities into practical Cloud and AI solutions, validate their value and support successful adoption of Alibaba Cloud.

Customer Discovery and Technical Account Ownership:
- Own the technical relationship with customer decision-makers, architects and engineering teams, building a clear understanding of their business priorities, technology landscape and constraints.
- Lead discovery workshops to identify use cases and assess their business value, technical feasibility and readiness.
- Develop technical account plans with sales, prioritizing opportunities and agreeing the technical milestones needed to move them forward.

Solution Architecture and Technical Validation:
- Design solutions using appropriate Alibaba Cloud services, explaining trade-offs across security, resilience, performance, integration, operational requirements and cost.
- Lead technical proposals, architecture discussions and responses to tenders, making assumptions, dependencies and limitations explicit.
- Define and run proofs of concept with agreed success criteria, scope and timelines. Use the results to address customer concerns and guide technical decisions.
- Present recommendations to both technical and business stakeholders, connecting architecture choices to customer outcomes and total cost of ownership.

Cloud and AI Adoption and Delivery Alignment:
- Work with customers, partners and delivery teams to establish a practical path from validated solution to production.
- Identify technical risks early, agree mitigation actions and provide a clear handover covering architecture, dependencies, acceptance criteria and ownership.
- Remain engaged on material architecture decisions and technical blockers during implementation, coordinating with product, engineering and support teams as needed.
- Identify opportunities to expand cloud adoption where additional services or workloads offer clear customer value.

Market Insight and Competitive Positioning:
- Track relevant industry trends, customer priorities and competing solutions, using these insights to shape account plans and solution recommendations.
- Develop evidence-based competitive positioning around customer requirements, technical capabilities, cost and implementation considerations.
- Feed lessons from customer engagements and win/loss reviews into the team’s approach to similar opportunities.

Reusable Solutions and Team Enablement:
- Turn proven customer solutions into reusable reference architectures, demonstrations, deployment guidance and case studies.
- Help adapt successful solutions for similar customers, documenting where requirements or assumptions differ.
- Deliver practical workshops and training that help sales teams and partners identify suitable opportunities and explain Alibaba Cloud’s value accurately.

Customer Feedback and Product Improvement:
- Translate recurring customer needs and technical gaps into clear product feedback supported by use cases, business impact and priorities.
- Work with product and engineering teams to assess gaps, coordinate defect escalation and communicate available workarounds or confirmed plans to customers.
- Share findings across account teams to improve future solution design and reduce repeated issues.

Requirements

Required Qualifications:
- Relevant experience: 5 years in solution architecture, technical presales, cloud engineering, software development or technical consulting, including direct engagement with enterprise customers.
- Customer discovery and technical ownership: Demonstrated ability to lead discovery discussions, understand business priorities and technical constraints, and translate them into clear requirements and implementable solution designs.
- Cloud architecture expertise: Strong hands-on experience with at least one major public cloud platform, such as Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, and a solid understanding of compute, storage, networking, databases, containers, identity and access management.
- Architecture and implementation experience: Design and support cloud migration, application modernization or enterprise cloud deployment initiatives. Able to explain trade-offs across security, resilience, performance, integration, operational requirements and cost.
- Hands-on solution validation: Ability to build demonstrations and proofs of concept using code, scripting or automation. Experience defining success criteria, evaluating results and documenting recommendations that support customer decisions.
- Problem-solving and technical risk assessment: Proven ability to investigate architecture and implementation challenges, such as performance bottlenecks, integration issues or cost constraints, and propose practical alternatives. Able to identify dependencies and risks early and agree mitigation actions with the relevant teams.
- Communication and influence: Ability to produce clear architecture diagrams, technical proposals and presentations, and adapt the discussion for engineers, architects and senior business leaders. Comfortable explaining technical limitations, business value and cost implications.
- Commercial judgment: Experience working with sales teams to assess opportunities, validate technical fit and identify barriers to adoption. Able to compare competing solutions objectively and explain where a proposed approach offers customer value.
- Cross-functional collaboration: Experience coordinating with customer teams, partners, product specialists and delivery teams to resolve technical issues and maintain clear ownership through solution validation and delivery handover.
- Practical AI understanding: Ability to assess AI use cases and discuss deployment considerations, including data requirements, model hosting, inference, compute capacity, security and cost. Able to work with specialists to validate more complex AI architectures.

Preferred Qualifications:
- Hands-on experience with Alibaba Cloud services and relevant cloud architecture certifications.
- Experience supporting strategic enterprise accounts with multiple stakeholders, partners and interconnected systems. Exposure to sports, media, entertainment or large international organizations would be valuable.
- Experience designing for time-critical launches, variable demand, high availability and disaster recovery.
- Deeper expertise in AI infrastructure, including GPU workloads, model training, deployment, inference optimization and the associated performance and cost trade-offs.
- Experience troubleshooting production systems or supporting major cloud implementations, with an understanding of operational readiness and effective escalation.
- A track record of creating reusable reference architectures, technical demonstrations or implementation guidance, and sharing knowledge through customer workshops, partner training or mentoring.