Principal Architect

About the role

This role involves defining and leading the security architecture strategy for Ensemble's AI platform, products, and infrastructure. You will influence the roadmap, mentor senior engineers, and partner with leadership to ensure Ensemble's AI systems are trustworthy, resilient, and defensible.

Responsibilities

• Define the end-to-end security architecture for AI/ML systems, including training pipelines, inference infrastructure, model storage, and APIs.
• Develop and maintain a threat model for AI-specific attack surfaces: model poisoning, adversarial inputs, prompt injection, model inversion, and supply chain risks.
• Lead design reviews for high-impact systems, setting standards for secure-by-default AI development.
• Owning the AI security roadmap, aligning it with product goals, compliance requirements, and industry best practices.
• Technical leadership: Serve as an authority on AI security decisions across engineering, product, and research teams. Partner with ML engineers to embed security controls throughout the model lifecycle — from data ingestion to deployment and monitoring. Drive adoption of zero-trust principles, least-privilege access, and defense-in-depth across AI infrastructure.
• Governance & Compliance: Translate evolving AI-specific regulations (NIST AI RMF) into actionable architectural requirements. Partner with legal, privacy, and compliance teams to ensure AI systems meet internal policies and external obligations. Produce executive-ready security assessments, risk summaries, and mitigation plans.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Act as a bridge between security, platform engineering, data science, and product management. Represent the organization in external forums, customer security reviews, and industry working groups. Contribute to open-source tooling, publications, or speaking engagements to build the organization's credibility in AI security.

Requirements

12+ years of experience in information security, with at least 5 years focused on cloud or platform architecture. Deep hands-on expertise in securing ML/AI systems, including LLMs, training pipelines, and model serving infrastructure. Demonstrated experience with AI-specific threat vectors: adversarial ML, data poisoning, model extraction, and prompt injection. Proficiency in cloud security (AWS, Azure, or GCP) including IAM, network segmentation, secrets management, and audit logging. Strong background in application security, cryptography, and secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC). Experience leading architectural decisions in a large-scale engineering organization. Excellent written and verbal communication — you can explain complex security risks to both engineers and executives.

Preferred

• Familiarity with AI governance frameworks: NIST AI RMF
• Relevant certifications such as CISSP, CCSP, or cloud security specializations
• Published research, conference talks, or open-source contributions in AI/ML security

Benefits

Comprehensive benefits package including healthcare, time off, retirement, and well-being programs. Professional certification opportunities and tuition reimbursement. Quarterly and annual incentive programs for all employees who go beyond and keep raising the bar for themselves and the company.

Pay

$148,800 - 223,200 based on experience and geographical location.

Schedule

This is a remote position; however, candidates must be willing and able to travel to and work onsite at client, temporary, or corporate office locations as business needs require.