Software Architect - AI

OVERVIEW

Live the experience. From professional empowerment to continual learning opportunities. From ongoing investment in new and emerging technologies to a career of self-determination. At Ulta Beauty, our tech team is critical to our scalability—and is recognized that way. We’ve been defined as a “mature start-up.” A place where interdepartmental exposure, open doors, and genuine collaboration is ubiquitous. Where challenges come fast and furious, requiring agility, mental dexterity, and creativity.

Where our passion for better solutions drives us and is core to who we are.

We’re engineering for the future of retail, and it’s no-holds-barred. But for those motivated by continual change and ambiguity, by superior leadership, by whip smart colleagues who will press you daily for your very best, you’ll find that virtually nothing’s impossible at Ulta Beauty.

The Architect is responsible for providing the overall technical solution for digital initiatives in our strategic focus areas, help evaluating the solution design process through technology implementation. They contribute to the practice of designing, describing, and managing the solution engineering in relation to solving business problems or developing MVPs. The role of Architect is a critical position within the Consumer Technology (CT), which will work closely with all CT teams within the AI space to understand requirements and participate in design discussions in a highly collaborative, dynamic, and fast paced environment.

This individual constantly strives to raise the bar on engineering excellence, lead the way, staying up to date with tools, trends, technologies, and frameworks both industry-wide and within Innovation Architecture.

The Architect is a highly skilled technical resource who collaborates with cross-functional internal business & technology teams, as well as external partners, to drive the overall architecture and designs of Ulta Beauty digital products and capabilities. This role is a hands‑on technical contributor who anticipates implementation risks, defines appropriate mitigation plans, and implements them as appropriate.

The Architect will have a passion to discover & evaluate innovative digital solutions, drive the process to experiment with new digital solutions to gain key insights, and be able to analyze the output of those experiments to determine potential viability for a larger scale implementation with the organization. The Architect will also mentor other developers on best practices and identifying and determining design patterns to deliver high quality maintainable codebase.

• Architect and evolve secure, scalable backend platforms (APIs, microservices, event‑driven systems) to support AI and non‑AI workloads.
• Ensure systems are reliable, observable, and extensible for future AI integrations.

• Collaborate with data science, ML engineering, and product teams to define backend interfaces, data pipelines, and integration patterns for AI/ML models and real‑time analytics.
• Lead the adoption of AI‑first engineering practices for model deployment, inference, and monitoring.

• Rapidly prototype and pilot test innovative solutions, transitioning successful pilots into production with delivery teams.
• Evaluate emerging technologies and frameworks to accelerate business capabilities and impact.

• Architect seamless integration between backend systems and AI platforms (e.g., Vertex AI, Databricks, Agent Space).
• Champion modern integration patterns such as event streaming, serverless functions, and service mesh for intelligent orchestration.

• Define and enforce programming and architectural standards, including secure development practices.
• Mentor teams on scalable architecture, AI enablement, and platform operations with an innovation‑driven mindset.

• Ensure backend and AI systems comply with enterprise security, regulatory, and responsible AI standards.
• Continuously assess new…