Principal Architect - AI Product Engineering

As an AI Product Engineering Principal Architect, you are the senior technical leader responsible for driving the design, delivery, and execution of complex, enterprise-grade AI solutions. You will lead teams of architects and engineers in building advanced AI systems—spanning generative AI, intelligent agents, data platforms, and cloud-native applications—while shaping the broader direction of 3Cloud’s AI Product Engineering practice.

You combine deep, hands-on technical expertise with strong leadership skills, enabling you to mentor technical teams, remove architectural barriers, and ensure successful delivery of highly complex AI programs. You are a trusted advisor to C-level stakeholders and a driver of innovation, ensuring that 3Cloud delivers scalable, secure, and high-impact AI solutions across industries.

Responsibilities
Technical Strategy & Solution Delivery
• Lead cross-functional engineering and architecture teams in the end-to-end delivery of complex AI systems, ensuring technical excellence and delivery quality.
• Define and enforce reference architectures, technical patterns, delivery standards, and accelerators for enterprise AI adoption (leveraging Azure capabilities where appropriate).
• Provide senior-level architectural oversight on programs, guiding the design of advanced, distributed, AI-powered applications across multi-system enterprise environments.
• Drive the integration of modern AI capabilities—such as generative AI, intelligent/agentic systems, and Model Context Protocol (MCP)—into production-ready software.
• Champion best practices for performance, scalability, reliability, observability, and MLOps/LLMOps across all AI delivery engagements.

Client Engagement & Technical Leadership
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to executive stakeholders (CIO, CTO, CDO), helping them define enterprise AI strategies and prioritize high-value opportunities.
• Lead technical workshops, architecture reviews, and visioning sessions to align solution direction with business outcomes.
• Represent 3Cloud’s technical leadership in client engagements, partner discussions, and industry events, effectively communicating complex AI and engineering concepts.

Program Leadership & Delivery Management
• Oversee a portfolio of large-scale AI delivery programs, ensuring architectural integrity, risk mitigation, and alignment with client strategy.
• Provide proactive technical guidance to remove delivery blockers, solve architectural challenges, and ensure teams are building scalable and secure solutions.
• Shape the technical direction of sales pursuits, proposals, and multi-year roadmap engagements through expert-level architectural insight.

Practice Leadership & Mentorship
• Mentor senior architects, tech leads, and engineers, raising the overall technical bar of the practice.
• Define and expand internal frameworks, reusable components, delivery IP, and reference architectures to improve quality and speed across AI engagements.
• Contribute to thought leadership through whitepapers, conference speaking, open-source contributions, and community involvement.
• Intentionally evangelize AI Product Engineering capabilities and opportunities across the company and projects to promote awareness and consideration in cross-practice opportunities and proposals.

Requirements
Education & Experience
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 12+ years in software engineering or application development, with 5+ years in architecture leadership roles delivering enterprise-scale systems.
• Proven experience leading teams in delivering complex, cloud-native, AI-driven applications from concept to production.

Enterprise Transformation & Program Leadership
• Extensive experience guiding large-scale modernization or AI adoption programs across multiple business units.
• Demonstrated ability to build and execute technical strategies that align with enterprise business goals.

Deep expertise across several of the following areas:
Agentic AI & Orchestration
• Designing intelligent agent workflows using frameworks such as Semantic Kernel or LangChain; implementing tool/function calling with planning and orchestration patterns.Search & Retrieval
• Architecting solutions using vector databases, hybrid search, and RAG optimization techniques.LLM Evaluation, Quality & Operations
• Building evaluation pipelines, golden datasets, quality gates, telemetry, feedback loops, and guardrails to support reliable LLM deployment.

Responsible AI, Security & Compliance
• Applying AI governance, safety, risk mitigation, and privacy controls across enterprise AI solutions.

AI Platforms & Data Foundations
• Hands-on experience with Azure AI, Azure OpenAI, Databricks, ML/data pipelines, event-driven architectures, and scalable data systems.

Cloud Engineering
• Expertise in API-driven, microservices-based, and containerized architectures on Azure. Deep familiarity with DevOps, CI/CD, IaC, and Microsoft development ecosystems (C#, .NET, Azure Functions, etc.).

Data Integration & Governance
• Experience building robust ETL/ELT systems with strong data quality and metadata governance practices.

Analytics & Visualization
• Ability to integrate analytics and ML outputs into enterprise applications and BI environments.

Innovation & Adaptability
• Continuously explores emerging AI technologies and can rapidly convert them into enterpriseready, technically sound solutions.

Tools & Methodologies
• Strong proficiency with modern development workflows, DevOps practices, GitHub, and AIassisted coding tools.
• Comfortable working in Agile environments and driving iterative delivery.

Strategic Vision & Business Acumen
• Ability to align technical architecture with business outcomes; capable of influencing and shaping long-term strategies.

Thought Leadership & IP Development
• Recognized for contributing to the AI ecosystem (articles, talks, OSS, frameworks, accelerators).
• Experience building reusable IP adopted across teams or practices.

Certifications
• Azure Solutions Architect, Azure AI Engineer, Databricks certifications, or other relevant cloud/AI credentials are highly valued.

Don’t meet every single requirement? At 3Cloud we are dedicated to building a diverse, inclusive and authentic workplace, so if you’re excited about this role but your past experience doesn’t align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, we encourage you to apply anyway.

At this time, we cannot sponsor applicants for work visas.