Solution Architect - AI & Data - Freelance

Context

Artificial Intelligence is at the core of a leading sports retail company's Mission and Vision 2035. Its use is rapidly accelerating across the company and represents major transformation opportunities: simplifying and standardizing everyday actions, optimizing and enhancing individual performance, and reinventing and transforming the company’s business activities. The company aims to frame AI-related practices to ensure that its use aligns with its core values Vitality, Generosity, Responsibility, and Authenticity and delivers long-term benefits for the Company, People, and the Planet.

The company’s Data & (Gen)AI Center of Expertise, made up of more than 200 teammates, supports and guides the entire organization in the “AI First for All” movement, by making Data and (Gen)AI technologies accessible so that each team can locally create AI-powered solutions.

Within this department, this role is an opportunity to join the “Adoption & Experience” team as a Solution Architect, to support the acceleration of AI solution adoption across the company’s 100,000 teammates, while ensuring compliance with standards, a clear governance framework, and the proper integration of use cases with technological systems. The position is based at the company’s Campus (Villeneuve d’Ascq) or in Paris.

Missions

Reporting to the Partnership squad, you will act as a high-level technical and methodological advisor for digital and business teams. You will handle complex technical deployments and provide expert consulting on Data & AI architectures to ensure the technical success of our users. You will work closely with the SWAT team which handles the vision and the architecture guidelines.

You will be responsible for the following:

• Guide the implementation of complex Data and AI solutions within business domains ensuring architectural best practices are upheld.
• Deploy directly onto high-stakes projects to handle complex technical deployments, operating under specific models (Time & Materials or Fixed Price).
• Resolve critical technical debt for local teams and ensure sustainable skill transfer so they can master the platform autonomously.
• Leverage our technical stack to allow the creation of new products and capabilities for tech experts across the company.
• Gather continuous field feedback during deployments to proactively improve the global platform ecosystem.

Requirements

• Strong engineering background with deep, hands-on expertise in Cloud, Data architectures, and AI solutions.
• Solid experience in technical consulting, solution design, or complex systems architecture.
• Ability to act as an authoritative technical advisor while maintaining a strong pedagogical approach for skill transfer.
• Fluent in written and spoken English (mandatory).

Working Conditions

• Location: Lille (Villeneuve d’Ascq) or Paris