Solutions Architect

Job Summary

We are seeking a skilled Solutions Architect - AI & Procurement to join NextGen Operations -Global Finance Services Division

The IS Specialist – Procurement & AI Architecture provides technical leadership for the design, governance, and delivery of scalable digital solutions across Caterpillar’s Guided Buy and Coupa ecosystem. This role serves as the end-to-end solution architect, accountable for alignment across upstream and downstream applications, integrations, data, and business processes within the Source-to-Pay landscape.

As Caterpillar advances AI-enabled and agentic capabilities, this role also functions as an AI Architect, partnering with agile delivery teams to design, review, and govern AI-driven solutions - including agents, automation, and decision-support capabilities—while ensuring compliance with enterprise architecture standards, security requirements, and Caterpillar Responsible AI principles.

The preference for this role is to be based out of Bangalore-Shared Services, Whitefield, KA-India

What you will do

• Solution & Enterprise Architecture

  • Serve as the end-to-end solution architect for Guided Buy and Coupa platforms, ensuring cohesive design across requisitioning, sourcing, purchasing, invoicing, supplier enablement, and downstream financial systems.

  • Design and govern integrations between Coupa/Guided Buy and upstream/downstream systems such as ERP, finance, supplier systems, middleware, data platforms, and reporting tools.

  • Define scalable, secure, and reusable architectural patterns for APIs, event-based integrations, data flows, and platform extensions.

  • Ensure architectural alignment with enterprise standards, IT controls, security, and SOX compliance requirements.

• AI & Agentic Architecture

  • Act as AI Architect for procurement and purchasing platforms, designing how AI capabilities are embedded into Guided Buy and Coupa to improve user experience, compliance, efficiency, and insights.

  • Provide architectural guidance for building AI agents, copilots, and automation solutions, including prompt strategy, orchestration patterns, data grounding, and decision boundaries.

  • Establish and enforce AI governance practices, including design reviews, risk assessments, Responsible AI alignment, and lifecycle management of AI agents and models.

  • Perform code and solution reviews for AI-enabled components to ensure quality, maintainability, security, and architectural consistency.

• Agile Delivery & Technical Leadership

  • Partner with Product Owners, Project managers, and development teams within an agile environment to translate business needs into clear, actionable technical designs and backlogs.

  • Guide teams through design decisions, trade-off analysis, and implementation best practices across sprints and releases.

  • Support solution planning for enhancements, upgrades, and modernization initiatives, including migration from legacy capabilities.

  • Own end‑to‑end troubleshooting and technical support for Guided Buy, Coupa, and the broader integrated solution landscape, partnering across teams to resolve complex cross‑system issues.

  • Mentor engineers and analysts on architecture principles, integration patterns, and AI solution design.

• Stakeholder Collaboration & Governance

  • Serve as a trusted technical advisor to procurement, finance, audit, security, IT, and external partners.

  • Lead or participate in architecture review boards, design governance forums, and change impact assessments.

  • Clearly communicate complex architectural concepts and risks to both technical and business audiences.

What you will have

• Technology Advising: Knowledge of effective advisory methods and ability to provide valued information and advice to clients regarding products, technologies, services and solutions for a specific technology domain.

• Application Design, Architecture: Knowledge of basic activities and deliverables of application design; ability to utilize application design methodologies, tools and techniques to convert business requirements and logical models into a technical application design.

• System and Technology Integration: Knowledge of the features and facilities of systems; ability to integrate and communicate among applications, databases and technology platforms.

• Systems Software Infrastructure: Knowledge of computer architecture and system software interaction; ability to design and build a fundamental architecture of operating systems, database management systems, communications protocols, compilers and other development tools.

• Technical Troubleshooting: Knowledge of technical troubleshooting approaches, tools and techniques; ability to anticipate, recognize, and resolve technical issues on hardware, software, application or operation.

Core Technical & Functional Skills:

• Enterprise & Solution Architecture: Proven ability to design and govern complex, integrated application ecosystems following SDLC process across cloud and on-prem environments.

• Procurement Platforms: Hands-on experience with Guided Buy, Coupa, or similar Source-to-Pay / P2P platforms.

• Integrations: Strong knowledge of APIs, middleware, ETL, event-driven architectures, and ERP integrations.

• AI & Automation: Working knowledge of AI/ML concepts, LLMs, AI agents, and automation patterns applied to enterprise workflows.

• Agile Delivery: Experience working within agile product teams, supporting backlog refinement, sprint execution, and continuous improvement.

This position requires candidate to work a 5-day -a -week schedule in the office.

What Will Set You Apart:

• Experience designing or governing AI agents, copilots, or AI-enabled enterprise applications.

• Strong understanding of Responsible AI principles, model governance, risk management, and ethical AI practices.

• Coupa administration, configuration, or large-scale deployment experience.

• Experience with cloud platforms, data environments, and reporting tools used in enterprise ecosystems.

• Proven ability to lead architecture discussions and influence decisions in a complex, global, matrixed organization.

Skills desired:

• Problem Solving: Knowledge of approaches, tools, techniques for recognizing, anticipating, and resolving organizational, operational or process problems; ability to apply knowledge of problem solving appropriately to diverse situations.

• Technology Advising: Knowledge of effective advisory methods and ability to provide valued information and advice to clients regarding products, technologies, services and solutions for a specific technology domain.

• Application Design, Architecture: Knowledge of basic activities and deliverables of application design; ability to utilize application design methodologies, tools and techniques to convert business requirements and logical models into a technical application design.

• Requirements Analysis: Knowledge of tools, methods, and techniques of requirement analysis; ability to elicit, analyze and record required business functionality and non-functionality requirements to ensure the success of a system or software development project.

• System and Technology Integration: Knowledge of the features and facilities of systems; ability to integrate and communicate among applications, databases and technology platforms.

• System Testing: Knowledge of system and software testing; ability to design, plan and execute system testing strategies and tactics to ensure the quality of software at all stages of the system life cycle.

• Systems Software Infrastructure: Knowledge of computer architecture and system software interaction; ability to design and build a fundamental architecture of operating systems, database management systems, communications protocols, compilers and other development tools.

• Technical Troubleshooting: Knowledge of technical troubleshooting approaches, tools and techniques; ability to anticipate, recognize, and resolve technical issues on hardware, software, application or operation.