Associate Solutions Architect

Do you want to build a career that is truly worthwhile? The World Bank Group is a unique global partnership of five institutions driven by a bold vision to create a world free of poverty on a livable planet. As one of the largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries, we help solve the world’s greatest development challenges. When you join the World Bank Group, you become part of a dynamic, diverse organization with 189 member countries and more than 120 offices worldwide. We work with public and private sector partners, invest in groundbreaking projects, and use data, research, and technology to bring tangible and transformative change around the globe. For more information, visit www.worldbank.org . ITS Vice Presidency Context The Information and Technology Solutions (ITS) Vice Presidential Unit (VPU) enables the World Bank Group to achieve its mission of ending extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet by delivering transformative information and technologies to its staff working in over 150+ locations. For more information on ITS, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9 v=VTFGffa1Y7w Department Context Digital platforms, data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) play an increasingly critical role in how development programs are designed, delivered, and adapted. Against that backdrop, the unit treats innovation as a first-class discipline: it moves promising ideas from concept to working software at speed, tests emerging technologies against real institutional problems, proves or disproves value quickly through Proofs of Concept (PoC) and Minimum Viable Products (MVP), and industrializes what succeeds into secure, scalable solutions. The unit builds predominantly within the Microsoft landscape, spanning the Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) where a specific workload calls for it. Its ambition extends beyond Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) content generation to Agentic AI, in which autonomous, goal-driven agents reason over institutional knowledge, invoke enterprise systems through tools, and carry multi-step work to completion under human oversight. Role Purpose The Solutions Architect (Innovation) designs and builds new solutions from idea to a proven, secure, working product. The role is hands-on: at this level the architect is expected to write the first version personally rather than specify it for others to build. Working within the architectural direction set by the team, the role shapes candidate solutions with business sponsors, advises on technical feasibility, and delivers experiments that answer real questions quickly. The emphasis throughout is on building, proving, and learning. Duties and Accountabilities Responsibilities include, but may not be limited to, the following. Idea to working solution • Work with business sponsors to turn high-level ideas into framed technical problems, candidate designs, and a realistic path to a first working version. • Build Proofs of Concept (PoC) and Minimum Viable Products (MVP) that validate concepts quickly and surface the technical risks worth knowing about before further investment. • Evaluate emerging platforms, frameworks, and AI models against specific institutional problems, and present findings with cost, risk, and adoption implications. • Apply a fail-fast approach, retiring ideas that do not prove out and documenting the learning so it benefits future initiatives. • Prepare successful experiments for transition to product teams, covering design documentation, operational readiness, and handover. • Contribute reusable patterns, accelerators, and components that shorten the path from idea to working software. Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse • Design and build solutions on the Microsoft Power Platform, using Power Apps for canvas and model-driven applications, Power Automate for workflow and process automation, Power Pages for external-facing experiences, and Copilot Studio for conversational and agentic interfaces. • Build Microsoft Dataverse data models, covering tables and relationships, business rules, calculated and rollup columns, alternate keys, and choice sets, with attention to performance and maintainability. • Configure the Dataverse security model through business units, security roles, teams, field-level security, and hierarchy security, ensuring least-privilege access to sensitive institutional data. • Extend the platform where declarative configuration is insufficient, using plug-ins, custom Application Programming Interfaces (API), Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) controls, and custom connectors. • Connect Dataverse to the wider estate using the Dataverse Web API, virtual tables, Microsoft Fabric and Synapse Link, and Azure integration services. • Apply Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) practice on the platform, including solution layering, managed and unmanaged solutions, environment strategy, and automated pipelines. • Judge when a requirement is best met by low-code configuration and when it warrants a pro-code approach, and explain that trade-off to sponsors. Agentic and AI-first solutions • Approach design on an AI-first basis, assessing where AI can materially change the shape of a solution rather than simply decorate it. • Build Agentic AI solutions in which autonomous agents plan, invoke tools and enterprise systems, maintain state across steps, and hand off to other agents or to a human, using Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365 Copilot extensibility, Azure AI Foundry, and Semantic Kernel. • Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions that ground models in institutional and domain-specific sources, including Dataverse content. • Apply traditional Machine Learning (ML) and predictive techniques where these fit the problem better than a generative or agentic approach. • Test AI solutions for accuracy, hallucination risk, bias, cost per transaction, and safe tool invocation, and implement guardrails and human oversight of agent actions. • Ensure AI solutions follow the World Bank Group's responsible AI, data privacy, and information security requirements. Secure engineering and integration • Build secure applications on Microsoft Azure, applying cloud-native patterns including serverless functions, containers, event-driven design, and API management. • Contribute to solutions hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) where a workload sits there. • Apply security by design across identity, secrets management, network isolation, and data protection at rest and in transit, and work with the Information Security team to meet its requirements and remediate findings. • Integrate new solutions with existing World Bank Group systems and data platforms so that experiments do not become isolated digital silos. • Document and explain designs, decisions, and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences, and share emerging practice with engineering colleagues.