Senior AI Architect

Overview

At Vontobel, AI is moving beyond pilots. We are building production‑grade, regulated, and scalable AI systems — and we are looking for the architecture leader who sets the technical direction behind them. As Senior AI Architect, you own the AI architecture across the firm: from LLM‑ and agent‑based solutions to the enterprise platforms, guardrails, and standards that make them work in production.

• Define, own, and continuously evolve the enterprise AI architecture and lead hands‑on delivery of production‑grade AI solutions end‑to‑end.
• Design and build LLM‑ and agent‑based AI systems.
• Establish and apply best practices for LLM and RAG architectures.
• Architect scalable, secure, and resilient AI platforms, leveraging distributed and event‑driven architectures.
• Act as a hands‑on architecture leader, mentoring senior engineers, leading architecture and design reviews, and delivering production‑ready prototypes and reference implementations.
• Work closely with Product, Security, Risk, Legal/Compliance, and IT, ensuring AI solutions meet regulatory, governance, and model‑risk requirements.
• Lead the AI Developer Guild to raise engineering standards and capability across the organization.

• Hands‑on senior AI architecture leader (not purely strategic) with deep engineering experience (8+ years in software engineering).
• Several years in architecture or technical leadership roles delivering production‑grade AI / LLM solutions.
• Strong backend and systems engineering expertise, with deep hands‑on experience in Python and modern API/service development.
• Practical experience engineering LLM‑powered applications, including LLMs, RAG, and agent‑based patterns.
• Solid MLOps and AI platform engineering background, covering model and prompt lifecycle management, offline and online evaluation, drift detection, reproducibility, and auditability of AI systems.
• Proven Dev Ops and cloud architecture experience, including CI/CD, infrastructure‑as‑code, container platforms (Kubernetes/Open Shift), observability, and secure cloud‑native architectures (preferably Azure).
• Comfort working in regulated, enterprise environments, balancing speed, quality, and risk while collaborating closely with Security, Risk, Compliance, and IT stakeholders.
• A pragmatic, communicative leader and mentor, comfortable owning decisions, navigating ambiguity, influencing multiple teams, and continuously raising the technical bar.
• Fluent in English;
  German is a strong plus.

• Top Zurich location with collaboration spaces and free lunch.
• All the latest technology to help you excel and advance.
• Agile environment in how we think, how we work, and our trust for each other.
• Flat hierarchy with collaboration at all levels.
• Campus feeling and a collaborative spirit.

At Vontobel, we are an equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability or gender identity. We value the many voices within our teams and are committed to creating an environment where everyone who wants to be part of our performance culture can be themselves.

It is based on mutual respect and zero tolerance for any form of discrimination.