AI Platform Chief Architect

Role Overview

• Define and maintain the enterprise architecture vision, principles, reference architectures, and decision frameworks for AI/ML platforms and adjacent technology domains.
• Establish architecture standards that promote reuse, interoperability, resiliency, security, and speed-to-market across products, platforms, and shared services.
• Drive architecture convergence across teams to reduce fragmentation, duplicate capabilities, technical debt, and long-term operational cost.
• Partner with senior technology and business leaders to ensure architecture roadmaps directly support strategic priorities and measurable business outcomes.
• Own the end-to-end architectural direction for enterprise AI/ML platform capabilities, including model integration, inference services, retrieval patterns, orchestration, and automation.
• Define production-grade patterns for observability, scalability, model/data traceability, policy enforcement, and responsible AI controls.
• Ensure platform capabilities can support secure onboarding of AI/ML use cases across DEV, UAT, and PROD environments with clear guardrails and repeatable patterns.
• Guide platform investment decisions by balancing innovation, risk, cost, operational complexity, and business value.
• Lead enterprise architecture strategy across hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems, including Azure, AWS, on-premises services, data platforms, integration layers, and shared platform capabilities.
• Define architectural patterns for secure data access, service integration, API management, event-driven flows, workload placement, and cost-aware scaling.
• Assess technology options and vendor/platform choices, making recommendations that balance enterprise standards, delivery velocity, security posture, and total cost of ownership.
• Ensure solution architectures align to enterprise security, compliance, resiliency, performance, and operational support requirements.
• Lead the architecture community of practice, establishing forums, review mechanisms, and decision processes that improve consistency without slowing delivery.
• Provide senior technical stewardship across domains, resolving complex cross-platform dependencies and ensuring end-to-end solution integrity.
• Coach and mentor architects, senior engineers, and technical leaders to raise architectural maturity and systems-thinking capability across the organization.
• Represent architecture in executive, risk, compliance, product, and engineering governance forums.
• Define architecture guardrails for security, privacy, compliance, data protection, model governance, auditability, and responsible AI.
• Identify and manage architectural risk across platforms, integrations, dependencies, and production operations.
• Ensure risk decisions are clearly documented, communicated, and aligned with enterprise control expectations.
• Translate complex architecture choices into clear executive-level recommendations, tradeoffs, risk implications, and investment options.
• Influence senior stakeholders across business, product, technology, security, and operations to align on enterprise architecture priorities and roadmap sequencing.
• Serve as a trusted advisor to technology leadership on platform strategy, modernization, vendor decisions, emerging technologies, and long-term capability planning.
• Drive alignment between architecture strategy, portfolio funding, delivery execution, and measurable business outcomes.
• Establish architecture-led operating mechanisms that improve transparency, dependency management, delivery predictability, and production readiness.
• Partner with engineering and platform leaders to ensure architectural decisions are reflected in backlogs, roadmaps, delivery plans, and operational support models.
• Promote disciplined use of Agile practices, Jira hygiene, architecture decision records, structured status reporting, and issue escalation paths.
• Hold teams accountable for solution quality, resiliency, performance, lifecycle ownership, and timely resolution of architectural risks.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree, or equivalent work experience
• 10 or more years of relevant software engineering experience
• Six or more years of experience leading multiple software engineering teams
• Extensive experience leading enterprise architecture, platform architecture, or large-scale technology transformation in complex organizations.
• Proven ability to set architectural vision, define standards, govern technical decisions, and influence executive-level strategy.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, data platforms, API/service integration, security architecture, and production operations.
• Strong understanding of AI/ML platform architecture, model integration patterns, responsible AI considerations, and data-driven systems.
• Demonstrated success leading across engineering, product, data, security, risk, compliance, and operations teams without relying solely on direct authority.
• Excellent executive communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs, risks, and investment choices clearly.
• Experience establishing or maturing an enterprise architecture function, architecture review board, or architecture community of practice.
• Experience with regulated, data-sensitive, or highly governed environments.
• Familiarity with architecture frameworks, decision records, technology road mapping, portfolio governance, and technical debt management.
• Experience shaping enterprise AI, GenAI, agentic AI, RAG, or intelligent automation strategies.
• Relevant architecture or cloud certifications such as TOGAF, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, or equivalent experience.

Tech Stack

• AWS
• Azure
• Cloud
• Distributed Systems

Benefits

• Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)
• Basic term and optional term life insurance
• Short-term and long-term disability
• Pregnancy disability and parental leave
• 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan
• Paid vacation (from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure)
• Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities
• Adoption assistance
• Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law