AI Architect

shifttechnology; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

Shift Technology seeks a senior AI Architect to define the overarching technical vision for its agentic AI platform. You will collaborate with engineers, data scientists, and leadership to shape and scale our core AI strategy, aligning product goals with robust, secure, and observable systems.

You will lead the integration of MCP, RAG patterns, vector pipelines, and agent orchestration layers, ensuring scalable, auditable deployments across enterprise cloud environments.

Qualifications

• Senior technical leader with deep mastery of modern AI ecosystems.
• Production system design skills in enterprise cloud environments (Azure).
• Hands-on experience with agentic frameworks and scalable AI architectures.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the architectural strategy for Shift's agentic AI ecosystem.
• Architect backend AI services to Support production-grade agents.
• Collaborate with engineering and design to enforce standards and system coherence.
• Improve model performance, latency, and compute efficiency across deployments.
• Adopt MCP, RAG patterns, and vector pipelines within the production stack.
• Establish governance, security, and observability for compliant AI deployments.

Skills

AI Architecture

Production Systems

Azure Cloud

Technical Leadership

Tools

Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Vector Databases

Embeddings Pipelines

Job description

Shift delivers AI agents that transform insurers' most critical work. By combining deep industry expertise and unmatched data resources, Shift provides proven results that have earned the trust of hundreds of the world's leading insurers. Our insurance-grade AI is accurate, explainable, and secure-empowering human experts to move with unmatched speed, total confidence, and a renewed focus on the people they serve.

Our culture is built on innovation, trust, and a drive to transform the insurance industry through our SaaS platform. We come from more than 50 different countries and cultures and together we are creating the future of insurance.

Learn more at www.shift-technology.com

ABOUT THE ROLE

Architects at Shift are the technical leaders who define the overarching vision across the various squads responsible for building and maintaining our platform's domains. You will be expected to devise innovative solutions for our clients' ever-evolving needs, maintain a continuous technology watch to keep our platform at the absolute state of the art, and act as the guardian of system design quality and the long-term robustness of our tech stack.

As our very first AI Architect, you will lead the overarching technical vision and architecture for Shift's agentic AI capabilities. This is a high-visibility, mission-critical position driving our shift toward an advanced, agent-first product ecosystem. You will work closely with engineering talents, data scientists, and senior leadership to define, build, and scale our core AI strategy. This includes integrating MCPs, robust experiment tracking and observability frameworks, advanced vector databases and embeddings pipelines, RAG architectures, and sophisticated agent orchestration layers.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Drive strategy & execution: define and spearhead the technical architecture for Shift's agentic AI ecosystem, translating high-level product goals into sustainable, scalable technical implementations
• Architect production AI services: lead the architecture of the backend services required to serve, manage, and scale AI agents in production environments
• Guide engineering & design: partner with agent-focused squads to review technical designs, enforce engineering standards, and ensure alignment with the broader system design
• Optimize operational quality: drive continuous improvements across model performance, output quality, latency, context-window efficiency, and token usage/compute budget governance
• Integrate emerging standards: benchmark and integrate emerging paradigms, such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), advanced RAG patterns, vector pipelines, and agent orchestration frameworks, into our production stack
• Ensure robustness & compliance: e stablish governance, security, and observability frameworks (LLMOps) to guarantee our AI deployments remain audit-ready, secure, and highly reliable.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We are seeking a senior technical leader who combines a deep mastery of modern AI ecosystems with rock-solid production system design skills in enterprise cloud environments (specifically Azure).

AI & data foundations

Hands-on expertise with agentic frameworks (e.