AI Architect

Principal AI/ML Architect

IPS is hiring for a Principal AI/ML Architect to own the architectural direction for the Intelligence and Agentic Workflows pillars of the Intelligence Platform — the technical direction every AI/ML and agentic project builds against. This is a player-coach role: most of the time is spent hands-on — designing solutions, prototyping, writing reference implementations, and reviewing critical PRs — not sitting above the work.

This person partners closely with the Senior Data Architect (who owns the canonical data layer underneath) and works across the engineering organization on cross-pillar coherence. Above this role sits only the CTO and VP of Engineering.

Year-One Priorities

• AI/ML platform evolution — architect the Intelligence layer (data, training, learning, reasoning) and the Agentic layer (workflow automation, agentic UX); stand up agent-friendly platform surfaces (MCP or equivalent); enable just-in-time, AI-generated interfaces.
• AI leverage in how the product builds and ships — make AI a structural part of how the company delivers value, so humans and agents move the roadmap faster together.
• Foundational stability — drive the reliability and architecture customers can trust for production AI workloads.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architectural vision and technical roadmap for Intelligence and Agentic interfaces and workflows.
• Design and evolve agent-based workflows with strong trust patterns — grounding, evals, confidence scoring.
• Build evaluation frameworks measuring model quality, agent reliability, and drift; make AI workloads observable.
• Lead the polyglot AI stack: vector search, embeddings pipelines, RAG architectures, agent frameworks, model lifecycle, MLOps.
• Set engineering standards through working reference implementations and in-repo patterns other teams can copy.
• Engage directly with customer-facing teams and customers to ground architectural decisions in real workflows.
• Mentor engineers and raise the technical bar through code review and design review.

Ideal Background

• 10+ years in software engineering, including 5+ years in Principal, Staff+, or Architect roles at a B2B SaaS or AI/ML platform company.
• Track record architecting systems where AI agents are first-class consumers — MCP servers, agent-facing APIs, retrieval-grounded interfaces.
• Deep Python and modern AI/ML stack fluency — Lang Chain, Lang Graph, PyTorch, vector stores, embedding pipelines.
• Hands-on production experience with RAG, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and eval-harness design.
• Hands-on experience with agent frameworks (Lang Graph, Auto Gen, CrewAI, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent) in production, including what breaks and how you handled it.
• C#/.NET and Azure familiarity is a plus for integrating with Stratus's existing platform — not a requirement to already know the stack.
• Comfortable being hands-on-keyboard — this is an individual-contributor role with architectural authority, not a paper-only architect.