Lumai
Senior Solutions Architect (UK)
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The Opportunity
Lumai has a working optical computer and customers evaluating it. Iris Nova is in the hands of hyperscalers, neoclouds, research institutions and enterprises, and every one of those conversations gets specific about the customer's own models and workloads. This hire is what makes those conversations land.
The Role
You will own the technical side of our customer engagements from first contact to a signed technical plan. You will lead discovery with the customer's infrastructure and ML engineering teams, map their workloads against what Lumai ships today and what is on the roadmap, and be straight about where we do not fit yet.
What is genuinely hard about this is that you will be proving a new kind of computer against the most demanding workloads in the industry. There is no reference account to lean on, the customers know their own bottlenecks better than anyone, and your numbers have to hold up both 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 an 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 and run benchmarks with our engineering team, and present the results to the customer.
- Write the technical case: proposals, solution documentation, and responses to RFIs, RFPs and tenders.
- Run demonstrations and technical workshops for customer engineering teams.
- Feed evaluation findings and customer requirements back into product and engineering.
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What We're Looking For
Must-have
- Several years in solutions architecture, technical pre-sales or senior field engineering for AI infrastructure, high-performance computing, or comparable deep-tech hardware.
- A working understanding of AI inference at scale: how large models are deployed in production, and what limits them.
- Data centre literacy: power, thermals, networking, and how a new system is integrated into an existing software stack.
- A track record of leading technical discovery with sophisticated customers and turning it into a solution they accept.
Strong preference for
- Direct experience with hyperscalers, neoclouds, frontier AI labs or national laboratories.
- Hands-on credibility in benchmarking and performance analysis.
- Familiarity with the competitive landscape for AI accelerators.
- Exposure to photonics, optics or post-silicon compute.
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.
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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.
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