Associate Partner Consulting, Enterprise AI

About the role

As an Associate Partner Consulting, Enterprise AI, you will lead the delivery of complex GenAI programs end-to-end, stay close to engineering, and translate business goals into architecture and execution plans. You will be a valued member of the GenAI Consulting team and work collaboratively with managers, primary teams, and client stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Lead multi-workstream GenAI delivery programs, including scope, planning, staffing, risk management, dependencies, and stakeholder communications.
• Architect and review key technical decisions such as model selection, RAG design, context schemas, orchestration, tool-use, memory patterns, and evaluation strategy.
• Establish engineering standards (ADLC-style phases, quality gates, testing/evaluations, observability) and ensure teams ship production-grade solutions.
• Partner with enterprise architects to integrate AI capabilities with ERP/SCM/CRM, data platforms, identity, and integration layers.
• Convert ambiguous requirements into clear backlogs, technical specifications, and acceptance criteria; drive rapid iteration while protecting security and compliance.
• Build reusable assets: reference architectures, accelerators, prompt/context libraries, evaluation harnesses, and delivery playbooks.
• Coach and mentor senior engineers and architects; provide technical leadership, code/design reviews, and pragmatic problem solving.
• Consistently demonstrate the Cognizant Way to Lead, which means operating with Personal Leadership, Organizational Leadership, and Business Leadership.

Requirements

• 10–18 years in software engineering/architecture with demonstrable delivery of production systems in enterprise environments.
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications: RAG pipelines, tool-use agents, multi-step workflows; comfortable guiding implementation details.
• Strong grasp of cloud-native architecture (APIs, microservices, event-driven patterns), plus security and observability best practices.
• Practical experience with embeddings, semantic search, vector databases, re-rankers, and evaluation frameworks for RAG quality.
• Experience integrating with enterprise systems (ERP/SCM/CRM), middleware, and data platforms; strong understanding of system-of-record semantics.
• Demonstrated delivery leadership in transformations (ERP programs, modernization, cloud migrations) with real constraints: compliance, data quality, and integration complexity.
• Strong understanding of enterprise data architecture (lakes/warehouses, governance, lineage) and how to operationalize it for AI context and retrieval.
• Confidence operating in regulated environments and driving controls for privacy, security, auditability, and data residency.
• Strong prompt and context engineering: system prompts, structured outputs, tool-use prompting, and context assembly patterns.
• Experience building agentic systems with orchestration frameworks (or custom implementations) and designing safe tool integrations.
• Strong communication and executive-ready storytelling: explain architecture, trade-offs, and risks to varied audiences.
• Delivery mindset: thrives in ambiguity, drives decisions, removes blockers, and raises the bar on engineering quality.
• Collaborative leadership: partners effectively with product, security, data, and client stakeholders to move work forward.

Qualifications

• Demonstrated ability to embody the Cognizant Way to Lead: Leading Self, Leading Others, & Leading the Business.
• Embodiment of Cognizant’s Values of: Work as One, Dare to Innovate, Raise the Bar, Do The Right Thing, & Own It.

Skills

• Software Engineering/Architecture
• Cloud-Native Architecture
• LLM-Powered Applications
• Enterprise Data Architecture
• Regulated Environments
• Collaboration & Leadership
• Storytelling & Communication
• Delivery Mindset

Benefits

Remote work is available for this role, but it includes a hybrid and travel-based delivery model, including travel to client sites and Cognizant offices as needed.

Pay

The annual base salary for this position is $137,250 - $2405,000 based on experience. This position is also eligible for Cognizant's discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant's applicable plans.