Senior Solutions Architect (US)

The Opportunity

Lumai's North American customers - hyperscalers, neoclouds, frontier AI labs and national laboratories - are evaluating optical compute now, and the region is being opened up as a market. What it needs is the person who owns the technical half of that: someone who can sit with a customer's ML engineers, prove the system against their workload, and leave them with a case they can argue internally. This is that hire.

The Role

You will own the technical heart of Lumai's customer engagements in North America, working alongside the business development lead. You will run deep technical discovery with the region's most demanding buyers, translate what they need into a Lumai-based solution mapped against both shipping and roadmap systems, and work hands-on with the benchmark team to prove it against real customer workloads. You will author the technical proposals and responses that let a customer make the argument for Lumai inside their own organisation, and you will be the channel back into product and engineering.

What is genuinely hard about this is that you are proving a new kind of computer against the most demanding workloads in the industry, with no reference account in the region to point at. These customers know their own bottlenecks better than anyone, and your numbers have to hold up twice: in a benchmarking conversation with an ML engineer, and in a business case that survives a procurement review.

By month six, you will have run discovery with the accounts on our target list, delivered at least one benchmark-led evaluation a customer accepted, and written the first version of the engagement playbook the rest of the team can run.

What You'll Do

• Lead technical discovery with customer infrastructure and ML engineering teams.

• Map customer workloads onto Lumai's shipping and roadmap systems, and be straight about the gaps.

• Define the shape of each engagement: benchmark, proof of concept, reference architecture or statement of work.

• Scope, run and interpret benchmarks with Lumai's benchmark team, and own the presentation of the results.

• Author the technical case: proposals, solution documentation, and responses to RFIs, RFPs and tenders.

• Design and deliver demonstrations and technical workshops for customer engineering teams.

• Feed customer requirements, evaluation feedback and roadmap reactions back into product and engineering.

• Own the technical relationship on the account alongside Lumai's business development lead.

What We're Looking For

Must-have

• Substantial experience in a solutions architecture, technical pre-sales or senior field engineering role within AI infrastructure, high-performance compute, semiconductors or comparable deep-tech hardware.

• Strong working knowledge of AI inference at scale: how large language models are deployed in production, and what limits them.

• Familiarity with data centre architecture: rack power, thermal, networking, and integration with existing software stacks.

• A demonstrated ability to lead technical discovery with sophisticated customers and translate requirements into a solution they accept.

• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, sometimes ambiguous, pre-product environment.

Strong preference for

• Direct experience selling into, or working within, hyperscalers, neoclouds, frontier AI labs or national laboratories.

• Awareness of the competitive landscape and how Lumai's optical approach is positioned against it.

• A background in, or genuine curiosity about, novel compute: photonics, optical computing or other post-silicon architectures.

• Enough hands-on credibility with benchmarking and performance analysis that customer ML and infrastructure engineers respect your reading of the results.

About Lumai

Lumai is the optical compute company building the next generation of AI infrastructure. Spun out of optics research at the University of Oxford in 2021, we compute with light instead of electrons. Our 3D optical technology carries out the matrix multiplications at the heart of AI inside beams of light travelling through free space, which lets it go beyond the limits of both silicon GPUs and integrated photonics.

In April 2026 we launched Iris Nova, the world's first optical computing system to run billion-parameter large language models in real time, using up to 90% less energy than conventional GPU-based systems. Iris Nova, the first server in the family, is now available for evaluation by hyperscalers, neoclouds, enterprises and research institutions. Aura and Tetra will follow.

Our work won the Falling Walls Award for Science Breakthrough of the Year 2025 and 'Best Overall Technology' at the OCP Future Technologies Symposium. We are headquartered in Oxford.

Why Lumai

You'll work on a new kind of computer. Optical computing for AI has been promised for decades. We have a working system running real models, and the hard part left is taking it to volume.

Your work ships. We are moving from first product to volume production, so what you build this year goes into the servers our customers run.

You'll work across disciplines. Optical engineers, machine learning researchers, and hardware and software engineers solve problems together. You will learn things that don't appear on your job description.

The work matters beyond Lumai. AI's appetite for energy is one of the defining constraints of the next decade. Our mission is sustainable intelligence at global scale: AI that is faster, cheaper to run and far less power-hungry.

You'll join early. You'll have a real say in how we build the product, the team and the way we work.

Equal Opportunity

Lumai is an equal opportunity employer. We make hiring decisions based on skills, experience and potential, and we welcome applications from people of all backgrounds. If you need an adjustment at any stage of the hiring process, let us know and we will do our best to support you.