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About This Role
At Softchoice, a World Wide Technology (WWT) company, we work together to make a new world happen. As an IT solutions provider serving U.S. commercial and SMB organizations, as well as the entire Canadian market, we help organizations turn ambition into real‑world outcomes. We do this through the delivery of secure cloud, AI, software and digital workplace solutions that enable agility, innovation and growth.
With a highly engaged, high-performing team, we are certified as a Great Place to Work® in both Canada and the United States, and have been recognized as a Best Workplace in Canada for more than 20 years. We stand proudly for our people and their success through career development and advancement, and continuously strive to do what’s good for our people and communities.
As part of WWT, we connect customers to the global scale, advanced innovation, world-class partnerships, and deep expertise of a leader in AI and digital transformation. This includes access to WWT’s Advanced Technology Center (ATC), a collaborative ecosystem featuring state-of-the-art hardware and software that enables customers and partners to conceptualize, test, and validate innovative solutions before deploying them at scale.
The impact you will have:
The M365/Workforce AI Senior Practice Architect is a senior technical leader within the Microsoft Practice, responsible for owning and evolving the architectural direction of our Microsoft 365 and Collaboration practice. This is a Principal Architect / Practice Architect role focused on architectural leadership, offer innovation, and customer advisory. The Practice Architect shapes methodologies, reference architectures, and delivery standards; develops and matures service offerings, assessments, and workshops; and engages with high-value customers to ensure transformative business outcomes. This role aligns closely with the strategic direction of the AI Business Solutions and Modern Work portfolio, where architectural leadership, offer innovation, and customer advisory capabilities are more important than hands-on implementation expertise.
What you'll do:
Technical Leadership & Expertise
- Serve as the subject matter expert and architectural authority for the Microsoft 365 and Modern Work portfolio, setting technical direction across the full estate rather than a single workload.
- Bring demonstrable depth across Exchange, Teams and Teams Voice, SharePoint and collaboration, Intune and endpoint management, Azure Virtual Desktop, Entra ID, and tenant-to-tenant migration and consolidation.
- Stay ahead of emerging trends, ensuring the practice adopts and evangelizes the latest Microsoft innovations.
- Lead the integration of AI capabilities into traditional solution delivery models, transforming customer workflows and outcomes.
- Evolve and influence Microsoft 365 core workloads and collaboration practice strategy and architectural direction.
- Provide architectural guidance, oversight, and governance for complex, large-scale programs.
- Serve as a strategic advisor for M&A, divestiture, tenant consolidation, and tenant-to-tenant migration initiatives - defining and evolving the migration and workplace modernization approach rather than executing it.
Methodology & Best Practice Development
- Coordinate the development, documentation, and continuous improvement of methodologies and best practices for Microsoft 365 Core workloads
- Collaborate with architects, engineers, and product managers to ensure consistency and quality across engagements.
- Define best practices, reference architectures, and delivery standards that scale across the practice.
- Mentor and influence architects and engineers, raising the architectural bar across the team.
Offerings Development & Enablement
- Support the creation and evolution of Microsoft 365 Core offerings, working closely with product management and delivery teams.
- Act as “Customer Zero” for new technologies, piloting and refining offerings before broad rollout.
- Provide presales support, solution architecture, and technical leadership for strategic opportunities.
- Develop and mature service offerings, assessments, workshops, methodologies, and repeatable intellectual property.
- Support sales, solutioning, and executive customer engagements, working with sales and solution teams to shape opportunities.
High-Value Customer Engagement
- Engage directly with key customers as a trusted advisor, guiding their Microsoft transformation journeys.
- Lead solution workshops, architecture reviews, and executive briefings for high-impact engagements.
- Operate as a peer-level architectural advisor to senior technical and executive stakeholders at large enterprise customers.
Collaboration & Advocacy
- Partner with Microsoft and other strategic partners to co-create solutions and drive joint success.
- Represent Softchoice/WWT at industry events, sharing thought leadership and promoting best practices.
- Advocate for continuous improvement and early adoption of emerging technologies.
- Collaborate with Microsoft and partner teams to align offerings and GTM motions, including Microsoft funding programs and strategic partner motions.
What you'll bring to the table:
- Deep expertise in Microsoft 365, Modern Work, and Microsoft Collaboration solutions.
- Strong architectural background across Microsoft 365, Endpoint Management, Entra ID, Collaboration, and Workplace Modernization.
- Proven experience architecting and delivering complex Microsoft solutions for enterprise customers.
- Proven experience building service offerings, methodologies, assessments, workshops, and repeatable intellectual property.
- Experience advising on M&A, divestitures, tenant consolidations, or tenant-to-tenant migration strategy.
- Strong track record in methodology development, technical leadership, and innovation.
- Strong executive communication, customer advisory, collaboration, and stakeholder management skills.
- Experience working with Microsoft and global partners.
- Commitment to continuous learning and professional growth.
- This role requires at least 15 years experience in a technical field (ideally with Microsoft technologies)
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field is preferred.
Preferred Experience
- Former Microsoft experience, such as FastTrack, Customer Engineer, Cloud Solution Architect, Consulting Services, or Customer Success.
- Experience at leading Microsoft-focused consulting organizations or partners.
- Experience supporting Microsoft funding programs and strategic partner motions.
- Public speaking, community leadership, or Microsoft MVP experience.
- Current or prior titles such as Principal Architect, Practice Architect, Principal Consultant, Lead Architect, Modern Work Strategist, or M365 Strategy Lead.
Compensation:
A reasonable estimate of the current base pay range for this position in NYC and Seattle is $175,820 to $219,780 annually + 10% as target incentives.
A reasonable estimate of the current base pay range for this position in LA is $167,830 to $209,790 annually + 10% as target incentives.
Actual salary will be based on a variety of factors, including location, experience, skill set, education, and related certification. The range for this position in other geographic locations may differ.
Softchoice offers a comprehensive and competitive benefit plan to all full-time employees, which includes:
- Health and Wellbeing: Medical, Dental, and Vision Care, Flexible Spending Account, Employee Assistance Program
- Financial Benefits: 401k Plan with Company Matching, Life and Disability Insurance
- Paid Time Off: PTO and Sick Leave (starting at 20 days per year), Holidays, Parental Leave, Volunteer Days, Bereavement Leave
- Additional Perks: Employee Discount Program
Not sure if you qualify? Think about applying anyway:
We understand that not everyone brings 100% of the skills and experience for the role.
At Softchoice, we offer opportunities to a diverse group including those with a variety of workplace experiences and backgrounds. Whether you are new to corporate tech, returning to work after a gap in employment, or looking to transition and take the next step in your career, we are excited to learn more about you and encourage you to apply.
Why You’ll Love Working Here:
- The People: You’ll thrive in our collaborative environment, surrounded by incredible colleagues who foster support and innovation, driving our collective success
- High-Performing Culture: At Softchoice, we are dedicated to achieving our goals and committed to success for our customers and each other
- Flexibility: Plan your workdays in a way that suits you best
- Award-Winning Workplace: Proudly recognized as a Great Place to Work for 21 consecutive years
- Inclusive Culture: We are committed to a company culture where every team member can be their authentic self
- Competitive Benefits: Benefit from competitive perks that start on day one
Inclusion & Equal opportunity employment:
We are an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, inclusion & belonging. People seeking employment at Softchoice are considered without regard to any protected category including but not limited to, race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, disability, veteran status, gender identity, or sexual orientation.
Require an accommodation? We are ready to help:
We are proud to provide interview & employment accommodation during the recruitment and hiring process. If you require any accommodation to apply or interview for a position, please reach out directly to [email protected]. We are committed to work with you to best meet your needs.
Our commitment to your experience:
We are committed to the safety of all candidates and team members. With that in mind, we have implemented virtual interviewing for everyone. We understand that you may need to interview with distractions around you (such as children or furry friends) and we will most likely be doing the same.
Before you start with us, we will conduct a criminal record check, verify your education and check your references.
When you join Softchoice, we will onboard you remotely. Don't worry. It's quick, simple and you'll be connected with your new team in no time.
Job Requisition ID: 7749
EoE/Vet/Disability
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Salary Context
This $175K-$219K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 1623 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Softchoice, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $229,300. This role's midpoint ($197K) sits 7% below the category median. Disclosed range: $175K to $219K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Softchoice AI Hiring
Softchoice has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Based in Seattle, WA, US. Compensation range: $219K - $219K.
Location Context
AI roles in Seattle pay a median of $226,100 across 1,045 tracked positions. That's 6% above the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $256,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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