Data & AI Architect

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Philippines.

📋 Description

• Lead the technical solutioning prior to contract and ensure smooth delivery, maintaining continuity from proposal to production.

• Allocate time roughly equally between client engagement and project delivery, adjusting as needed based on the pipeline.

• Formulate technical strategies, critically evaluate problem statements, and facilitate discovery workshops.

• Create target-state architectures, build sequences, proposal assumptions, exclusions, risks, and defensible estimates.

• Design proofs of concept lasting four to six weeks and act as a technical peer to client architects, data leaders, and CIOs.

• Take ownership of end-to-end architecture and, when necessary, lead delivery, scope, stand-ups, and client technical activities.

• Implement complex components and reference solutions directly.

• Deliver Databricks lakehouses, encompassing medallion layers, Unity Catalog, Delta Lake, ingestion, and orchestration.

• Develop production generative AI systems that include RAG, agents, evaluation, prompt/context engineering, cost, and latency considerations.

• Establish CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, testing, observability, and cost standards.

• Mentor client engineers and oversee production readiness and handover processes.

• Transform delivery experience into reference architectures, accelerators, templates, and estimation models.

• Contribute to Frontier Academy and keep recommendations current across Databricks, Microsoft, and Anthropic.

• Assist in shaping and eventually leading a small delivery team, including recruitment activities.

⛳️ Requirements

• Approximately eight years of experience in data/AI engineering and architecture, with at least three years of significant design authority and senior client-facing consulting experience.

• Experience with Databricks, including lakehouse architecture, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Spark/PySpark, Lakeflow or Delta Live Tables, orchestration, performance, and cost optimization.

• Familiarity with Azure/Microsoft technologies: Data Factory or Fabric, ADLS, Azure OpenAI or AI Foundry, Entra ID, and networking.

• Production experience with generative AI, including RAG, vector stores, agents/tool usage, evaluation, guardrails, and prompt/context engineering, such as Claude or an equivalent frontier model.

• Proficient in production-level Python and SQL.

• Strong judgment in data modeling across dimensional, data vault, and wide denormalized approaches.

• Fundamentals of DevOps/MLOps: version control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containers, and monitoring.

• Excellent command of written and spoken English for executive proposals, decision records, and presentations.

• Databricks Professional or Azure Solutions Architect Expert certification is desirable.

• Experience with Big Four, global systems integrators, or specialist consultancies, including bids, statements of work, and estimation is desirable.

• Experience applying responsible AI governance and delivery in financial services, retail, or travel is desirable.

• Familiarity with Australian/APAC clients, Snowflake, dbt, Power BI or Fabric, and mentoring small engineering teams is desirable.

🏝️ Benefits

• No benefits, perks, or compensation extras are specified.