Principal Ai Architect

Description:

You will lead the system design for how agentic features are built, integrated, and operated reliably at production scale, working in close partnership with our Data Science team, who bring the model and ML depth. Your focus is the system: orchestration, state and memory, tool boundaries, failure semantics, and how all of it composes with the wider platform.

Like the rest of our architecture function, you'll prototype to prove out decisions rather than implement full solutions, and you'll set direction through Technical Design Reviews (TDRs), and standards. Deep data-engineering specialization isn't required, but you should be comfortable reasoning about data flows, storage decisions, and how agentic systems consume and act on data.

What You'll Do

• Own the system design for our agentic capabilities: orchestration, context and state, tool boundaries, and reliability patterns for non-deterministic systems
• Write the TDRs, design docs, and standards that set architectural direction for agentic work across teams
• Prototype to validate architectural decisions before teams commit to them at scale
• Partner with Data Science so that agent and model work composes cleanly with existing platform services, from APIs and event streaming through to storage
• Review TDRs from across engineering, giving teams substantive feedback on architecture and risk, not only on AI work
• Build consensus across engineering teams and get them genuinely aligned, not merely compliant
• Help drive the shift to AI-assisted and agentic development across engineering, shaping how engineers design, review, and iterate in an AI-native workflow
• Mentor senior and staff engineers on agentic system design and measurably elevate the technical bar
• Communicate architectural decisions and their trade-offs clearly to executives and customers

Required Qualifications:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time as a senior, staff, or principal-level architect or technical lead designing production systems
• Deep expertise in distributed systems: service boundaries, consistency models, event-driven architecture, API design (REST; gRPC familiarity a plus), and operating systems reliably at scale
• Hands-on experience building, prototyping, and architecting agentic or LLM-powered systems in production, not just demos: agent loop design, context engineering, MCP and tool/function-calling integration, RAG architectures, memory and state management, and reliability and guardrail patterns for non-deterministic systems
• Working knowledge of data engineering fundamentals, including data modeling, pipeline design, and streaming vs. batch, sufficient to make informed architectural calls without deep specialization in the domain
• A track record of influence without authority: presenting a technical direction to skeptical engineers and earning genuine buy-in, and giving rigorous design review feedback on systems you didn't build yourself
• Strong technical writing and mentorship: TDRs, design docs, and decision records that teams can act on without hand-holding, plus a history of raising the technical bar around you
• Ability to communicate complex architectural decisions clearly to executives and customers
• Comfort operating as a senior individual contributor, driving outcomes through prototyping and technical credibility