Lead AI Architect

About the role

We are seeking a visionary AI Architect to serve as the technical cornerstone of our artificial intelligence strategy. The role involves defining the end-to-end architecture for AI solutions, encompassing data pipelines, model storage, inference engines, and front-end integration. The individual will be responsible for evaluating and selecting the optimal "tech stack," including specific LLMs, vector databases, and orchestration frameworks, to meet the company's long-term needs.

Responsibilities

• Lead to provide strategic consultation to business customers in defining or designing business processes, functions and organizational structures, as well as in researching, identifying and internally marketing enabling technologies based on customer capability requirements.
• Facilitate development of the most complex enterprise business solutions that combine knowledge of particular business processes and issues, general technological options, and process facilitation techniques.
• Lead and participate in enterprise strategy development, including environmental analysis, opportunity identification, value cases and business innovation portfolio development.
• Specify and design large or the most complex systems, solutions, networks, infrastructure elements, or processes.
• Select appropriate design standards, methods and tools and ensures that they are applied effectively.
• Lead reviews of others’ system design to ensure selection of appropriate technology, efficient use of resources and integration of multiple systems and technology.
• Evaluate and undertake impact analysis on the most complex major design options.
• Ensure that the system architecture balances functional, service quality and systems management requirements.
• Use appropriate tools, including models of components and interfaces, to contribute to the development of the most complex architectures.
• Produce detailed component requirements, specifications and translates these into detailed solutions/designs for implementation using selected products.
• Provide advice on technical aspects of system development, integration (including requests for changes, deviations from specifications, etc.) and processes.
• Select and use tools and methods to establish, clarify, and communicate the functional and non-functional requirements of system users, their characteristics, and tasks.
• Identify the technical, organizational, and physical environment in which the most complex products or systems will operate.
• Identify, propose, initiate, and lead significant improvement programs, taking responsibility for the quality and appropriateness of the work performed and the realization of measurable business benefits.
• Modify existing process improvement approaches and/or develop new approaches to achieving improvement.
• Lead the resolution of a variety of architecture and business problems and serve as a technical or business lead for highly complex project initiatives.
• Communicate effectively will all levels of organization.
• Manage expectations of customers, partners and management.
• Participate in customer walkthroughs and plans; design and technical walkthroughs; and problem resolution and decision making.
• Interact with departments across the organization as necessary, including the development and interpretation of highly complex requirements for peers and other staff.
• Maintain an in-depth knowledge of specific technical aspects in area of expertise and provides expert advice regarding their application.

Requirements

• Strategic thinking, with the ability to anticipate 12–24 months ahead in AI trends and prepare the infrastructure accordingly.
• Cost management skills, specifically optimizing cloud spend for GPU/TPU resources.
• Exceptional communication skills are also required, demonstrated through the ability to document architectural patterns and lead technical design reviews.

Qualifications

• Strong cross-functional leadership, acting as the technical liaison between Data Science, DevOps, and Product teams to align the AI roadmap with infrastructure capabilities.
• Architectural expertise, including a deep understanding of distributed systems, microservices architecture, API design, and cloud-native patterns.
• Expert-level knowledge of cloud platforms such as AWS (SageMaker), Azure (Azure ML), or GCP (Vertex AI).
• Mastery of the AI lifecycle, from frameworks like PyTorch/TensorFlow to deployment tools like Kubeflow, MLflow, or BentoML.
• An expert understanding of Generative AI, including Transformer architectures, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), and fine-tuning methodologies.
• Experience in enterprise integration, particularly in migrating legacy systems to AI-augmented workflows.
• A proven track record of 5+ years in software engineering or data science, with at least 3 years in an architectural role.

Skills

• Current skill set are reviewed every other year, new skills may be required to meet changing business needs.
• IMSDB2Oracle and Teradata Databases
• Data Warehousing
• COBAL
• Visual Basic
• CC++
• SAS
• Java/JavaScript Framework
• Pega
• CSS3
• Mobile
• JSON
• Cognos
• Hadoop
• SQL
• J2EE
• HTML5/XML
• Project Management Tools (Waterfall and/or Agile)

Education

• Required: Bachelor’s Degree in Information Technology or closely related field
• Preferred: Master's Degree

Experience

• Required: 7 years in an IT discipline
• Required: 7 years in a Business discipline

License and Certifications

• None Required
• Preferred: Industry certifications such as Java Developer, DB2, Cogno, PEGA, Enterprise Architect(SCEA), Project Management

Pay Range

Minimum $118,400.00
Maximum $196,800.00