IBM watsonx Data & AI Architect

IOTA deploys IBM watsonx inside the customer's perimeter. Our clients are banks, financial institutions and public-sector bodies across the GCC, where a managed cloud service is not an option and the platform has to run on infrastructure the customer owns. As watsonx Data & AI Architect you own the target architecture and the route to it.

This is a design role with your hands on the system. You decide how a watsonx.data Premium estate is laid out on IBM Power 10, how governance and cataloguing work once the data cannot leave the building, and how an existing cloud deployment is brought down to on-premises without losing what the customer already built.

What you'll do

• Own the target architecture for watsonx.data Premium and watsonx.ai on IBM Power 10 — topology, sizing, storage, networking, high availability and disaster recovery
• Design the migration from cloud to on-premises: what moves, in what order, what is rebuilt, and how the customer keeps running throughout
• Architect Core, Common Core Services and the Control Plane, including identity integration, entitlements and multi-tenancy
• Design the Data Governance and Catalog model — classification, lineage, policy enforcement and stewardship — against NDMO, PDPL and SAMA expectations
• Design Data Product Hub: how data products are defined, published, discovered and consumed across the organisation
• Set the query architecture on Presto C++, including workload isolation, caching and the performance envelope the customer should expect
• Define the Data Integration and DataStage landscape — ingestion patterns, batch and change data capture, scheduling and error handling
• Work with the customer's architecture board, security and infrastructure teams, and carry the design through their change process
• Produce the artefacts that outlast you: reference architecture, decision records, sizing models and runbooks

What we offer

• Competitive salary, reviewed annually
• Hybrid, based in Riyadh, with time on client sites across the Kingdom
• Deep exposure to regulated estates most architects never see inside
• Architecture authority over platforms that run in production, not pilots

What we're looking for

• Demonstrable architecture experience with IBM watsonx.data and watsonx.ai, including watsonx.data Premium
• Hands-on understanding of the platform's parts: Core, Common Core Services, Control Plane, Data Governance and Catalog, Data Product Hub
• Presto or Presto C++ at scale — query planning, federation, performance tuning, and the limits of each
• Data Integration and IBM DataStage: designing pipelines someone else has to operate
• IBM Power 10, AIX or Linux on Power, and the realities of deploying enterprise software on it
• Experience taking a cloud deployment on-premises, or building on-premises for customers who cannot use cloud at all
• The judgement to say what a design cannot do, in front of a customer, before it is built
• Professional English; Arabic is a strong advantage

Nice to have

• Lakehouse architecture — Apache Iceberg, open table formats, on-premises object storage
• Prior work inside banks, government or other regulated estates in the GCC
• Familiarity with SAMA, NDMO and PDPL obligations on residency, classification and access
• Red Hat OpenShift on Power and container platform operations
• IBM certification on watsonx or Cloud Pak for Data