Senior Director, AI Architect

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

📋 Description

• Oversee Patra’s AI & Data Architecture function, taking charge of its strategy, organizational structure, technical direction, priorities, delivery, quality, and operational model.

• Assemble and lead multidisciplinary teams that encompass AI engineering, data engineering, machine learning, enterprise data architecture, analytics infrastructure, and shared AI services.

• Manage talent and performance, which includes setting objectives, conducting performance evaluations, promoting career development, making hiring and promotion decisions, and providing compensation recommendations.

• Define Patra’s target-state enterprise AI and data architecture.

• Guide the architecture for document ingestion, metadata extraction, indexing, semantic retrieval, vector search, knowledge enrichment, and AI consumption.

• Oversee the development of agentic capabilities into production-grade enterprise infrastructure.

• Create standards and processes for AI training, fine-tuning, benchmarking, and dataset evaluations.

• Establish architecture and governance for AI observability and telemetry.

• Lead the strategy for the enterprise data platform across AWS services, Snowflake, and/or Databricks.

• Define and govern operational, analytical, event-driven, semantic, and AI-oriented data standards.

• Ensure enterprise data capabilities facilitate business intelligence, operational reporting, experimentation, decision support, and executive intelligence.

• Establish governance surrounding data ownership, lineage, provenance, classification, quality, lifecycle, access control, AI usage, and auditability.

• Safeguard customer and tenant data through stringent multi-tenant segregation.

• Develop jurisdiction-aware strategies for retention, archival, residency, and deletion.

• Set SLAs, SLOs, quality metrics, and operational standards for data and AI capabilities.

• Guide reusable platform capabilities for identity, access, observability, model access, evaluation, security, compliance, tenancy, CI/CD, and data services.

• Establish integration standards for products, internal systems, partner platforms, APIs, event streams, and external data providers.

• Operate AI and data capabilities as enterprise products while measuring adoption, reliability, quality, and developer productivity.

• Lead architecture governance, reference architectures, engineering standards, and cross-organizational technical decisions.

• Oversee the AI and data portfolio, allocate resources, and manage technology investments.

• Shape Patra’s multi-year AI and data roadmap.

• Provide counsel to executives on AI strategy, enterprise data architecture, investments, organizational capacity, delivery risks, governance, and technology trade-offs.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 10 years of progressive experience in software engineering, enterprise architecture, data engineering, cloud platforms, artificial intelligence, or machine learning.

• Extensive experience in leading senior technical professionals.

• Proven track record in forming, scaling, and directing multidisciplinary engineering and data organizations.

• Experience in recruiting professional employees, developing managers and technical leaders, evaluating performance, making promotion and compensation recommendations, planning organizational capacity, and allocating resources across teams and strategic initiatives.

• Comprehensive understanding of production AI systems, including LLM applications, RAG, embeddings, semantic and vector search, agentic architectures, AI orchestration, evaluation, observability, governance, and human-in-the-loop systems.

• Significant experience in directing the architecture of platforms that support structured, semi-structured, and unstructured enterprise data.

• Background in document-intensive domains.

• Experience in establishing strategies around AWS-native data services, including S3, Redshift, streaming and event technologies, as well as platforms like Snowflake and/or Databricks.

• Strong understanding of operational, analytical, dimensional, event-oriented, lakehouse, semantic, and domain-oriented data architectures and their trade-offs.

• Experience leading organizations that are responsible for enterprise reliability, availability, security, performance, and operational-readiness requirements.

• Experience in establishing enterprise standards for data quality, ownership, lineage, retention, tenant segregation, access control, auditability, and lifecycle management.

• Experience working in regulated environments where contractual, security, privacy, regulatory, data-residency, or jurisdiction-specific requirements impact architecture.

• Proven ability to translate technology strategy into prioritized, funded, staffed, and measurable programs.

• Capacity to advise senior executives while maintaining credibility with senior engineers and architects.

• A history of building organizations where managers and technical leaders can independently handle significant responsibilities.

🏝️ Benefits

• Equal opportunity employer dedicated to celebrating diversity and fostering a safe and inclusive environment for all employees.