Associate Principal, AI Solution Architecture

When you’re the best, we’re the best. We instill an environment where employees feel engaged, satisfied and able to contribute their unique skills and talents while living and working as their authentic selves. We provide extensive opportunities for personal and professional development, building both employee competence and organizational capability to fuel exceptional performance through an inclusive environment both now and in the future.

The Associate Principal, AI Optimization & Delivery – Solution Architecture serves as the technical cornerstone of Vizient’s AI Optimization & Delivery organization. As a principal individual contributor with a greenfield mandate, this role serves as the primary technical design authority for AI Optimization & Delivery. The position partners with AI Optimization & Delivery leadership, Enterprise Architecture, and delivery pods to ensure Vizient’s AI ecosystem integrates cohesively with the enterprise and supports adoption across distributed engineering teams.

The immediate focus is to bring architectural clarity to existing pilot initiatives by designing blueprints for an agentic component layer, establishing technical exit criteria for the sandbox-to-production graduation process, and laying the foundation for a managed AI Internal Developer Platform (IDP). Over time, this role will architect an ecosystem that enables Vizient’s engineering teams to deliver AI-powered solutions at scale, accelerate delivery velocity, and prevent architectural debt.

This role combines hands‑on technical design with systems‑level thinking. The ideal candidate can objectively evaluate emerging frameworks, serve as a technical design authority for delivery pods, and translate regulatory and business requirements into secure, scalable platform capabilities.

• Establish architectural standards and design patterns for LLM-enabled workflows, agentic systems, and multi‑agent orchestration.
• Define hybrid system patterns that balance LLM‑based judgment with deterministic code for high‑confidence and compliance‑sensitive operations.
• Architect the initial design and governing standards for the platform component layer, including shared libraries, reusable agent templates, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, vector databases, and hybrid search patterns.
• Establish contribution models and reusable patterns that engineering squads can adopt, extend, and maintain.
• Define the AI Bill of Materials (AIBOM) approach, including model provenance tracking, third‑party model risk assessment, and version governance.
• Establish observability standards that support telemetry, reasoning traceability, operational monitoring, and auditability.
• Design routing architectures that optimize latency and cost, including semantic caching, model fallback strategies, and intelligent workload distribution between small language models (SLMs) and frontier large language models (LLMs).

• Define technical exit criteria and architectural standards for a governed sandbox-to-production graduation process.
• Partner with AI Operations (AIOps) and pilot teams to transition successful initiatives into governed platform environments.
• Architect and maintain data models for enterprise agent registries and context‑management strategies, including memory architecture and resource‑connectivity patterns.
• Lead technical evaluations of AI technologies, platforms, and protocols, documenting architectural rationale and supporting vendor‑agnostic decision‑making.
• Architect data privacy and security boundaries tailored to healthcare data, including protected health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII).
• Ensure…