Principal IT Architect

Requisition :  96740 Next Era Energy Resources is one of America’s largest wholesale electricity generators, harnessing diverse energy sources to power progress. We deliver tailored energy solutions that fuel economic growth, strengthen communities, and help customers achieve their energy goals. Ready to make a lasting impact? Take the next step in your career with us!

Position Specific Description The Principal IT Architect will serve as the senior technical leader for applications and platforms supporting NEET Transmission and NEER Development. This role will partner with Enterprise Architecture, Cybersecurity, Data Governance, Cloud Infrastructure, business stakeholders, and delivery teams to define and execute technology modernization strategies.

The successful candidate will translate enterprise technology direction into practical roadmaps, reference architectures, engineering standards, and scalable solutions. This individual will lead through technical expertise and influence, guide the organization toward an AI-first future, and establish the architecture, engineering practices, and governance needed to deliver secure, reliable, and production-ready AI-enabled solutions.

Key Responsibilities Define current-state, target-state, and transition architectures for the NEET Transmission and NEER Development technology portfolios.

Develop and execute modernization roadmaps that improve scalability, reliability, cybersecurity, supportability, and cost efficiency.

Serve as the primary liaison with Enterprise Architecture and ensure portfolio solutions align with enterprise strategies, standards, and approved technology patterns.

Provide architecture leadership for complex initiatives involving transmission planning, interconnection, renewable development, engineering analysis, modeling, analytics, and related business processes.

Lead solution design across application, integration, API, data, cloud, infrastructure, security, machine learning, and generative AI domains.

Establish reusable reference architectures, design patterns, architecture decision records, and technical standards.

Evaluate legacy applications and recommend appropriate rehost, replatform, refactor, replace, rebuild, or retire strategies.

Provide expert guidance for AWS and/or Google Cloud Platform infrastructure architectures, including compute, storage, networking, identity, security, observability, resiliency, disaster recovery, and cost optimization.

Lead the end-to-end architecture and delivery of machine learning and generative AI solutions from use-case evaluation and prototyping through production deployment, monitoring, support, and lifecycle management.

Define scalable patterns for retrieval-augmented generation, vector search, embeddings, multi-agent architectures, model orchestration, tool use, function calling, and enterprise-system integration.

Establish formal AI evaluation and validation practices, including prompt evaluation, model-quality testing, grounding and citation validation, safety guardrails, hallucination mitigation, human-in-the-loop controls, and measurable acceptance criteria.

Establish Responsible AI architecture practices addressing security, privacy, data governance, explainability, auditability, model risk, human accountability, and regulatory requirements.

Advance MLOps and LLMOps practices for model and prompt versioning, deployment, evaluation, monitoring, observability, governance, incident management, and performance optimization.

Guide development teams in the use of AI-assisted engineering, agentic development workflows, and AIDLC practices while establishing appropriate quality gates for AI-generated code, tests, designs, and documentation.

Lead architecture reviews, technical evaluations,…