Principal Architect

About the role

The opportunity is for a Principal Architect — Enterprise Architecture & AI. This is a high-impact architecture role for someone who thinks in systems, speaks in trade-offs, and has genuine hands-on experience designing for the age of AI.

Responsibilities

• Set the technical direction for how we build, integrate, and evolve complex software systems — spanning cloud-native services, data-backed applications, and AI-powered workflows. Work across engineering disciplines, bringing coherence to architectural decisions that affect multiple product teams and long-term platform health.
• Lead the architectural design of AI-enabled systems: LLM integrations, agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), tool-use patterns, and multi-agent orchestration. Define how AI capabilities are composed into products safely and at scale.
• Shape how AI systems are designed, evaluated, monitored, and iterated — from prompt engineering and model selection through to evaluation frameworks, observability, drift detection, and responsible deprecation.
• Define integration patterns across services, APIs, event-driven systems, and AI components — ensuring cohesion, resilience, and clear contracts between system boundaries.
• Embed security, PCI/PII compliance, and responsible AI controls into architectural defaults structurally, not bolted on.
• Raise the architectural thinking of senior engineers and tech leads through direct engagement, clear documentation, and collaborative design — not top-down control.
• Produce Gate 0 (ROM) and Gate 1 (detailed) architecture estimates for your initiatives, with clearly documented assumptions, risk flags, and dependency inventories that product and portfolio teams can plan from.

Qualifications

• 10–15 years in software engineering, with significant time in principal or staff architect roles across complex, multi-team environments.
• Strong cloud architecture experience on AWS — services, networking, data, and security patterns at scale.
• Proven experience designing and architecting AI-integrated systems — including LLMs, agentic patterns, RAG, and tool-use orchestration.
• Familiarity with the AI development lifecycle: model evaluation, observability, responsible AI practices, and iterative improvement.
• Broad engineering background across backend services (Java ecosystem preferred), APIs, event-driven architecture, and data systems.
• Experience in regulated environments (PCI/PII) with a track record of building compliance into design rather than adding it after.
• Comfortable working at multiple altitudes — from whiteboard architecture to reviewing a pull request when it matters.

Skills

• Mentorship and leadership skills.
• Technical writing and communication skills.
• Ability to think strategically and solve complex problems.
• Experience with AI and machine learning concepts.
• Experience with cloud platforms and architectures.
• Experience with data systems and security best practices.

Benefits

Not specified.

Pay

$170,000 - $190,000 USD, commensurate with experience.

Schedule

Not specified.