Principal Digital Architect

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

📋 Description

• Take ownership and define solution and platform architectures for large-scale, distributed systems from inception to production.

• Design architectures that comply with standards for scalability, performance, resilience, and security.

• Evaluate, select, and implement new technologies, including the development of proof-of-concepts and architectural spikes.

• Set and enforce architectural standards, patterns, and best practices across platform teams.

• Offer architectural guidance and mentorship to engineering teams.

• Ensure that solutions adhere to security, compliance, and regulatory requirements.

• Create and maintain architecture documentation, detailing rationale and trade-offs.

• Advance platform architecture to enhance developer productivity, system reliability, and cost-effectiveness.

• Collaborate with business leaders, product owners, engineering managers, and delivery teams to ensure alignment of architecture with business objectives.

⛳️ Requirements

• Bachelor's degree with over 5 years of experience in a similar role.

• Capability to deconstruct complex problem domains and formulate pragmatic architecture options with well-defined trade-offs.

• Ability to influence others without authority and assist teams in navigating architectural decisions and implementation challenges.

• Proficient in clearly communicating complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Skilled in translating business and non-functional requirements into scalable technical designs.

• Strong foundation in modern application and platform architectures utilizing established patterns and standards.

• Experience in defining AI reference architectures and standards for enterprise integration.

• Ability to articulate and justify trade-offs between traditional ML, LLM-based approaches, and non-AI solutions.

• Proven experience in transitioning AI systems from proof-of-concept to large-scale production deployment.

• Robust programming background in Python and Java, with the ability to reason at the code level.

• Experience in designing and constructing enterprise-scale, distributed systems.

• Practical experience with cloud-native architectures, AWS services, Docker, and Kubernetes.

• In-depth understanding of SQL and NoSQL databases, Snowflake, data modeling, replication, and sharding.

• Familiarity with CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, and automated testing.

• Strong experience in REST, GraphQL, and gRPC API design, including versioning and documentation.

• Hands-on experience in designing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures.

• Experience with data ingestion pipelines, document preprocessing, chunking strategies, vectorization, embedding models, retrieval, ranking, and context assembly.

• Knowledge of embedding techniques, similarity search, vector dimensions, chunk size and overlap, latency, recall, and cost trade-offs.

• Familiarity with vector databases and search layers.

• Experience with agentic frameworks.

• Experience in prompt design and versioning, context management, memory patterns, model routing, and fallback strategies.

• Understanding of LLM lifecycle considerations, including model selection, fine-tuning, RAG, hybrid approaches, evaluation, monitoring, and drift detection.

• Awareness of AI performance, latency, cost controls, token efficiency, security, data privacy, and guardrails.

• Experience in integrating AI capabilities into enterprise platforms through APIs and event-driven architectures.

• Ability to evaluate, prototype, and productionize emerging AI technologies.

🏝️ Benefits

• 401(k)

• Dental insurance

• Vision Insurance

• Disability insurance

• Employee assistance program

• Health insurance

• Health savings account

• Life insurance

• Paid time off

• Paid Holidays

• Full benefits