AI Application Architect

procore; United States; On-site; USD 233,000 - 321,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity compensation

Bonus incentive compensation

Competitive pay

Job summary

Procore is seeking an AI Platform Architect to define and drive the architecture of AI-native applications and LLM-powered workflows across the stack. You will shape multi-model inference pipelines, integrate LLMs with backend services, and lead LLMOps, observability, and security practices for scalable SaaS platforms.

You will mentor senior engineers, establish engineering standards, and collaborate with product and research to evaluate and adopt emerging AI capabilities.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering with 5+ years in a principal/staff or architect-level role.
• Hands-on experience designing and shipping production LLM-powered applications.
• Experience shipping complex, user-facing application platforms - SaaS, productivity tools, or enterprise software.
• Demonstrated ability to lead full-stack teams building rich web application experiences (React, TypeScript/Node.js, backend Python) with API design sensibility.
• Deep understanding of enterprise requirements: User Management, RBAC/ABAC, audit logging, compliance, multi-tenant governance, admin tooling.

Responsibilities

• Define architecture for AI-native applications including agentic systems, RAG pipelines, multi-model inference layers, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
• Drive infrastructure decisions for scalable AI workloads: vector databases, workflow orchestration, and async compute patterns.
• Design and govern the integration layer between LLMs and backend services, including prompt management and cost governance.
• Lead LLMOps and observability strategy - tracing, evaluation pipelines, prompt versioning, drift detection, and platform integrations.
• Establish security and compliance posture for AI systems - SSRF/injection hardening, LLM guardrails, data residency, and supply chain security.
• Partner with product and research to evaluate emerging AI capabilities and determine adoption strategy.
• Champion engineering standards - API design, schema governance, testing strategies, ADRs.
• Mentor senior engineers and foster guild-level technical communities around AI platform topics.

Skills

Software architecture

LLM-powered apps

Full-stack leadership

Frontend: React/TypeScript/Node.js

Backend: Python

API design

Cloud-native (Kubernetes)

Security & zero-trust

RBAC/ABAC governance

Multi-tenant admin tooling

Tools

Temporal

Airflow

Langfuse

Arize

Milvus

pgvector

Turbopuffer

OpenTelemetry

Job description

What You'll Do:

• Define architecture for AI-native applications including agentic systems, RAG pipelines, multi-model inference layers, and human-in-the-loop workflows
• Drive infrastructure decisions for scalable AI workloads: vector databases (Turbopuffer, pgvector, Milvus), workflow orchestration (Temporal, Airflow), and async compute patterns
• Design and govern the integration layer between LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, open-source) and backend services, including prompt management, context window optimization, and cost governance
• Lead LLMOps and observability strategy - tracing (OpenTelemetry), evaluation pipelines, prompt versioning, drift detection, and integration with platforms like Langfuse or Arize
• Establish security and compliance posture for AI systems - SSRF/injection hardening, LLM guardrails, data residency, and supply chain security for model artifacts and dependencies
• Partner with product and research to evaluate emerging AI capabilities and determine when/how to adopt them (e.g., reasoning models, multimodal, fine-tuning, RLHF)
• Champion engineering standards - API design, schema governance, testing strategies, and architecture decision records (ADRS)
• Mentor senior engineers and establish guild-level technical communities around AI platform topics

What We're Looking For:

• 10+ years of software engineering with 5+ years in a principal/staff or architect-level role
• Hands-on experience designing and shipping production LLM-powered applications (not just prototypes)
• Experience shipping complex, user-facing application platforms - particularly in SaaS, productivity tools, or enterprise software.
• Demonstrated ability to lead full-stack teams building rich web application experiences (React, TypeScript/Node.js, modern frontend architectures) with strong backend (Python) and API design sensibility
• Deep understanding of enterprise requirements: User Management, RBAC/ABAC permission models, audit logging, compliance frameworks, multi-tenant governance, and admin tooling.
• Experience building contextual or adaptive UX - applications that respond to user state, workflow context, or personalization signals.
• Strong grasp of cloud-native architecture (Kubernetes, Helm, container security, CI/CD) on AWS, GCP, or Azure
• Solid understanding of API security: OAuth2, CSRF, rate limiting, secrets management, and zero-trust principles applied to AI endpoints

Preferred Experience:

• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or comparable tool-calling/plugin infrastructure
• Familiarity with workflow orchestration engines (Temporal, Prefect) for long-running AI tasks
• Exposure to LLM evaluation frameworks (automated judging, red-teaming, regression suites)
• Background in developer-facing products or internal AI platforms / AI coding tooling
• Understanding of supply-chain security for ML models (artifact signing, registry enforcement, SBOM)
• Contributions to open-source AI tooling or published architectural writing

Additional Information

• Base Pay Range: 233,360.00 - 320,870.00 USD Annual
• This role may also be eligible for Equity Compensation and/or Bonus Incentive Compensation.

Procore is committed to offering competitive, fair, and commensurate compensation. Actual compensation will be based on a candidate's job-related skills, experience, education or training, and location.

For Los Angeles County (unincorporated) Candidates: Procore will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest or conviction records, in accordance with the requirements of applicable federal, state, and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act.

A criminal history may have a direct, adverse, and negative relationship on the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of the conditional offer of employment:

1. 1. appropriately managing, accessing, and handling confidential information including proprietary and trade secret information, as well as accessing Procore's information technology systems and platforms;
2. 2. interacting with and occasionally having unsupervised contact with internal/external customers, stakeholders, and/or colleagues;
3. 3. exercising sound judgment.