Distinguished Frontier Engineer

Cognizant; Amsterdam; Hybrid; EUR 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

25 days holiday per year

Laptop provided

Smartphone provided

Pension scheme

Technology-forward organization

Job summary

Cognizant in the Netherlands seeks a Distinguished Frontier Engineer to shape enterprise AI delivery at scale. You will lead architecture design, guardrail specifications, and governance across multiple domains and clients, mentoring Frontier Engineers and driving responsible-AI frameworks.

You will partner with senior stakeholders and Frontier teams to set architectural standards, bias controls, and audit-trail designs while enabling scalable AI adoption across industries.

Qualifications

• 12-20 years of experience leading enterprise AI architecture initiatives.
• Deep knowledge of enterprise AI architecture and context-pipeline design at scale.
• Experience designing guardrails and responsible-AI frameworks for regulated environments.
• Delivery governance and cross-platform AI integration strategy experience.
• Ability to evaluate frontier models and design AI assurance patterns.

Responsibilities

• Design AI-native enterprise architectures and define human-agent capability matrices for delivery programmes.
• Author guardrail specifications and boundary documentation for agentic systems at enterprise scale.
• Lead client architecture review workshops and produce context-pipeline blueprints.
• Govern ADLC adoption across the portfolio and define standards for AI-generated code quality.
• Architect responsible-AI frameworks, including bias detection, explainability and audit-trail design.

Skills

Enterprise AI architecture leadership

Context-pipeline architecture at scale

Guardrail specification

ADLC governance

Cross-platform AI integration

Job description

About the role

As a Distinguished Frontier Engineer, you'll help shape the future of enterprise AI. As the senior technical leader who designs the enterprise-scale AI systems behind Cognizant's most complex client transformations, you'll define human-agent capability matrices, author guardrail specifications, lead client architecture workshops, and own the intellectual design of AI delivery at scale, spanning cross-domain, cross-platform and cross-sector work.

From responsible-AI governance to regulated decisioning systems, you'll set the standard rather than meeting it. Partnering with senior client stakeholders, AI leaders and Frontier teams across industries and geographies, you'll establish the frameworks, guardrails and architectural patterns that enable organizations to confidently adopt AI at scale, while technically leading cohorts of Frontier Engineers and Masters and mentoring the next generation of Frontier talent.

In this role, you will

• Design AI-native enterprise architectures and define human-agent capability matrices for delivery programmes.
• Author guardrail specifications and boundary documentation for agentic systems at enterprise scale.
• Lead client architecture review workshops and produce context-pipeline blueprints.
• Govern ADLC adoption across the portfolio and define standards for AI-generated code quality.
• Architect responsible-AI frameworks, including bias detection, explainability and audit-trail design.

Work model

We believe hybrid work is the way forward as we strive to provide flexibility wherever possible. Based on this role's business requirements, this is a hybrid position requiring 3 days a week in a client or Cognizant office in The Netherlands. Regardless of your working arrangement, we are here to support a healthy work-life balance through our various wellbeing programs.

The working arrangements for this role are accurate as of the date of posting. This may change based on the project you're engaged in, as well as business and client requirements. Rest assured; we will always be clear about role expectations.

What you must have to be considered

• 12-20 years of experience with enterprise AI architecture leadership.
• Deep expertise in AI-native enterprise architecture and context-pipeline architecture at scale.
• Strong background in guardrail specification and responsible-AI framework design, including regulated AI decisioning.
• Experience with ADLC delivery governance and cross-platform AI integration strategy.
• Skills in frontier-model evaluation and red-teaming, AIOps orchestration architecture and human-agent capability modelling.

These will help you succeed

• Enterprise AI architecture leadership paired with responsible-AI and guardrail design expertise.
• ADLC governance and standards experience across large portfolios.
• Technical leadership and advisory strength, including leading client architecture workshops.
• AI quality and evaluation design capability across agentic systems.
• Domain fluency, contextual judgment and a strong business-outcome orientation.

What We Offer

• A competitive salary based on your qualities and experience
• NS business card to cover your commute expenses
• 25 days of paid holiday per year
• A laptop and a smartphone
• A pension scheme
• Health insurance
• Organisation driven by technology - we have a tremendous technology backbone
• Open, 'can do' team spirit and international environment