Principal Architect – AI

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

📋 Description

• Spearhead the architecture and technical strategy for extensive Azure programs and portfolios to ensure solutions align with client objectives for value, security, scalability, reliability, performance, and cost.

• Establish modernization blueprints and reference architectures spanning applications, platforms, and data, which include system and subsystem designs, patterns, and standards that streamline delivery and operations over time.

• Convert business and product strategies into cloud architecture roadmaps and execution plans that yield measurable outcomes and adapt based on production feedback and telemetry.

• Steer significant architecture choices across programs, advocate for shared design standards and reusable models, and resolve high-impact technical trade-offs.

• Collaborate with teams to integrate solutions into cohesive end-to-end architectures with defined ownership boundaries and integration contracts.

• Ensure architectural oversight during delivery through design reviews, forums, and governance, maintaining alignment on cross-cutting concerns (security, performance, resilience, availability, compliance, observability, and cost) across teams.

• Advocate for modular design, clear boundaries, testability, CI/CD, and observability, ensuring that non-functional requirements are prioritized and systems remain reliable and maintainable.

• Leverage AI tools to expedite discovery, design, coding, testing, documentation, and analysis, scaling successful practices for consistent team adoption.

• Lead or co-lead discussions with executives and senior stakeholders regarding cloud modernization, platform strategy, AI adoption, and program roadmaps.

• Employ structured problem-solving techniques to clarify scope, dependencies, risks, and trade-offs, shaping delivery plans that balance value, cost, speed, and long-term system health.

• Establish a discovery strategy ensuring program objectives are reflected in a clear, traceable backlog linked to architecture and business outcomes.

• Articulate complex architecture and modernization strategies in straightforward terms for executives, business leaders, and technical teams, including options, trade-offs, and recommendations.

• Build trusted relationships with technology and business leaders, influencing priorities and investment decisions that enhance their engineering and architecture practices.

• Conduct structured decision-making forums (such as architecture reviews or steering committees) that yield clear decisions, documented rationales, and actionable next steps.

• Define architecture, discovery, and delivery frameworks and establish working agreements that facilitate predictable, incremental delivery across multiple teams and time zones, including cadences, artifacts, escalation paths, and hybrid delivery guidelines.

• Align teams on shared outcomes, APIs, integration contracts, and operating models, ensuring that cross-team dependencies are identified early, owned, and tracked through to completion.

• Promote effective use of Agile methodologies at program scale, ensuring that architecture, backlogs, and release plans support meaningful increments, stable team velocity, low defect escape rates, clear definitions of done, and adjustments based on telemetry and feedback.

• Monitor risks, technical debt, quality trends, and architectural drift across teams, recommending changes that keep programs on track while balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term system health.

• Assist in cross-practice opportunity qualification and estimating using playbooks, benchmarks, and templates, ensuring the organization concentrates on high-fit pursuits and enhances proposal quality and confidence in value, risk, and margin.

• Mentor Senior Architects, Delivery Architects, and senior engineers, aiding their development in systems thinking, architectural judgment, cross-team awareness, and their capacity to lead multi-team initiatives.

• Provide architectural oversight across programs, demonstrating pragmatic decision-making, including when to maintain solution simplicity, when to standardize, when to extend patterns, and when to introduce new technologies.

• Assist in shaping career paths and development plans for architects by clarifying expectations for operating at program scale and providing tangible examples of what constitutes excellence.

• Develop and maintain high-leverage learning assets—such as reference implementations, architecture decision records, playbooks, and mentoring guides—that facilitate onboarding and skill enhancement.

• Support hiring, calibration, and talent development by defining interview standards, participating in senior-level interviews and promotion reviews, and training others to apply those standards consistently.

• Uphold a high standard for executive-ready communication and storytelling, coaching others to ensure their narratives foster clear decisions and strengthen client trust.

• Cultivate a culture of psychological safety, inclusion, constructive feedback, and continuous improvement within and across teams, endorsing new ways of working that persist beyond individual projects.

• Contribute to the company's growth by identifying opportunities within your accounts that leverage all our capabilities and pursuing them with support from the account team.

• Purposefully build executive relationships within accounts to enhance our partnership and create opportunities for providing strategic value.

• Drive sales opportunities by engaging with pursuit teams as either the Pursuit Lead or Technical Solution Lead.

• Collaborate with sales, account, and practice leaders to shape the technical strategy for strategic pursuits, projects, and/or programs.

• Lead the formulation of solution options, program-level architectures, and estimates, clearly documenting assumptions, dependencies, and risks while explaining how proposed approaches drive business value and mitigate risk.

• Function as a senior technical advisor whose insights shape multi-track initiatives and support long-term account growth.

• Identify follow-on and adjacent opportunities—such as platform extensions, additional modernization waves, AI-enabled capabilities, or data estate modernization—that align with client strategies and 3Cloud’s strengths.

• Define and enhance reusable assets—such as reference architectures, modernization playbooks, landing zone templates, workshops, accelerators, and starter repositories—that become standard practices for delivery teams, minimizing cycle time and rework while adhering to architectural and non-functional requirements.

• Champion the adoption of modern frameworks, cloud platform capabilities, automation practices, and AI-assisted tools in a secure and responsible manner, utilizing pilots and experiments with explicit success criteria to convert innovation into stable, repeatable practice.

• Participate in internal cross-practice initiatives that disseminate patterns and lessons from large programs and reinforce our credibility with clients and partners.

• Shape enablement programs that expand capabilities and reusable assets across accounts and package applied innovation into offerings and assets utilized in delivery and pursuits.

⛳️ Requirements

• 12+ years of experience delivering solutions in a primary domain such as application development, cloud platform engineering, DevOps, or data and analytics, including significant work at the enterprise scale.

• 7+ years of experience in solution architecture and leading development or engineering teams, including multi-team or multi-workstream efforts at program scale.

• Ten or more years of relevant experience with a proven ability to set vision and lead enterprise-wide AI/ML adoption strategies.

• Thought leadership and deep expertise across several of the following:

• Agents & Orchestration – utilizing Semantic Kernel, LangChain, or similar frameworks to design intelligent workflows; applying tool/function calling, planner and agent-based patterns, and workflow automation engines.

• Search & Retrieval – implementing solutions with vector databases such as Azure AI Search, Pinecone, FAISS, or Milvus; applying hybrid search methods, re-ranking strategies, and selecting embedding models for accuracy and performance.

• Evaluation, Quality & LLM Operations – establishing offline and online evaluation approaches; utilizing golden datasets, hallucination and groundedness validation, toxicity and safety testing; building telemetry and feedback loops; managing monitoring, deployment pipelines, and ongoing optimization of large language models.

• Responsible AI, Security & Privacy – integrating practices such as threat modeling, privacy reviews, data minimization, safety guardrails, policy enforcement, auditability, and model risk management in accordance with GDPR and organizational standards.

• AI Platforms & Data Foundations – applying hands-on experience with Azure AI services, Databricks, Azure OpenAI, and related modern data platforms.

• Cloud Engineering – designing with APIs, containers, microservices, and DevOps pipelines to deliver scalable, cloud-native solutions.

• Data Integration & Governance – developing and managing data pipelines; implementing quality controls, metadata practices, and master data management approaches.

• Analytics & Visualization – delivering insights with Power BI and other visualization tools.

• Proven ability to integrate emerging AI frameworks into enterprise-ready solutions.

• Expertise with modern development tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Cursor).

• Knowledge of analytics and data science tools, frameworks, and advanced techniques.

• Relevant Azure or Databricks certifications in AI, Data, or Architecture.

• Proven experience leading architecture and delivery for Azure-based modernization, transformation, AI, or platform programs at enterprise scale.

• Experience defining solution and platform architectures that connect business strategy with scalable technical design, strong delivery practices, and measurable outcomes.

• Experience leading hybrid and remote teams and collaborating with multiple stakeholders across time zones while maintaining alignment, quality, and predictable delivery.

• Deep understanding of core concepts, languages, frameworks, and design patterns in a primary domain, with the capability to apply them at system and program scale.

• Experience designing and integrating quality, automation, and observability practices at scale, including automated testing strategies and embedding quality checks into delivery workflows.

• Experience leveraging AI-augmented development and integrating AI and machine learning capabilities into solutions (for instance, using APIs, frameworks, or cloud-based AI services and tools for code, test, and documentation acceleration).

• Substantial experience working in Agile or Scrum environments at scale, including backlog structuring, dependency management, integration planning, and release management.

• Proven success in consulting or professional services, including client-facing leadership and executive engagement.

• Familiarity with key Azure services used in modern solutions that are pertinent to your domain (for example, messaging, compute, data, security, networking, management, and integration services).

• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities, with excellent presentation, written, and verbal communication skills for both technical and business audiences.

• Commitment to continuous learning in cloud, data, and AI, with the ability to translate that learning into practical enhancements for teams and clients.

• Ability to promote culture, inclusion, and community participation across the organization in ways that support rapid cross-team collaboration.

• Relevant cloud architecture certifications (for example, Azure-focused architect certifications or comparable role-based certifications) are strongly preferred.

🏝️ Benefits

• Flexible work location with a virtual-first approach to work!

• 401(K) with a match of up to 50% on your 6% contributions of eligible pay.

• Generous PTO offering a minimum of 15 days, in addition to 9 paid company holidays and 2 floating personal days.

• Two medical plan options to provide you the choice to select what best suits your needs!

• Option for vision and dental coverage.