AI Architect/AI Engineer – Generative & Agentic AI

Cencora; Town of Texas (WI); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental and vision benefits

Parental leave

Professional development

Job summary

Cencora seeks an experienced AI Architect to lead enterprise Generative and Agentic AI initiatives. You will design and ship production-grade AI systems, mentor teams, and govern AI practices across Azure/Vertex ecosystems. You will balance speed with reliability while working closely with executives and engineers.

The role emphasizes healthcare distribution data, privacy, and responsible AI while driving rapid POC/MVP delivery and scalable API-first architectures.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, or a related field.
• 6+ years of IT experience spanning software engineering, cloud architecture, and AI/ML.
• 3+ years of hands-on architecture experience in Generative AI / Agentic AI systems.
• Strong expertise in Python and modern AI development frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience with LLMs (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, etc.).
• Deep understanding of RAG architectures and vector databases.
• Experience on at least one major cloud platform with native AI services.
• Proven MLOps/LLMOps experience: CI/CD, containers, observability.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture for enterprise Generative AI and Agentic AI solutions.
• Lead rapid POC and MVP development to validate AI use cases.
• Architect scalable AI platforms leveraging LLMs, RAG, vector databases, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Design API-first architectures (REST/GraphQL) for downstream apps.
• Define technology selection, standards, and governance practices for AI.
• Architect and guide MLOps/LLMOps for deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management.
• Lead architecture reviews and present designs to executives and engineers.
• Mentor AI engineers and raise technical standards across the team.
• Evaluate cloud AI services (Azure AI Foundry, Vertex AI) for scalability and security.

Skills

Python

LLMs

MLOps/LLMOps

Cloud architecture

Communication

Architectural leadership

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/AI/Data Science

Tools

LangGraph

AutoGen

Semantic Kernel

Pinecone

FAISS

Databricks Vector Databases

pgvector

Docker

Kubernetes

Azure OpenAI

Job description

Our team members are at the heart of everything we do. At Cencora, we are united in our responsibility to create healthier futures, and every person here is essential to us being able to deliver on that purpose. If you want to make a difference at the center of health, come join our innovative company and help us improve the lives of people and animals everywhere.

Job Details

About The Role

We are seeking an experienced hands-on AI Architect to lead the architecture, design, and delivery of enterprise-scale Generative and Agentic AI solutions. This is a hands-on architectural leadership role spanning system design, rapid proof-of-concept (POC) and MVP delivery, API-first solution architecture, and technical governance across our AI platform. The ideal candidate combines deep technical depth in LLMs, multi-agent orchestration, and RAG architecture with the ability to translate business needs into scalable, production-grade AI systems and to mentor engineering teams along the way.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture for enterprise Generative AI and Agentic AI solutions, from concept through production.
• Lead rapid POC and MVP development to validate AI use cases and de-risk technical approaches before full build-out.
• Architect scalable AI platforms leveraging LLMs, RAG pipelines, vector databases, and multi-agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, AutoGen, Semantic Kernel).
• Design API-first architectures (REST/GraphQL) that expose AI capabilities to downstream applications and enterprise systems.
• Define technology selection, architecture standards, and best practices for prompt engineering, model evaluation, and AI governance / Responsible AI.
• Architect and guide MLOps/LLMOps practices for deployment, monitoring, and model/agent lifecycle management.
• Lead architecture reviews and present designs to executive sponsors and engineering teams; drive stakeholder alignment.
• Mentor AI engineers, set coding and architecture standards, and raise the technical bar across the team.
• Evaluate and select cloud-native AI services (Azure AI Foundry, Google Vertex AI), balancing scalability, cost, security, and performance.

Our Tech Stack

• Databricks platform, Unity Catalog for governance, Delta Lake for data storage, Databricks Apps for hosting, and Databricks AI Gateway for model routing and governance.
• Microsoft Azure, including Azure AI Foundry for model deployment and orchestration.
• Multi-LLM provider access. Anthropic Claude, OpenAI (GPT & Codex), and other foundation models.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, or a related field.
• 6+ years of overall IT experience spanning software engineering, cloud architecture, and/or AI/ML.
• 3+ years of hands-on architecture experience specifically in Generative AI / Agentic AI systems.
• Strong expertise in Python and modern AI development frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience architecting solutions with LLMs (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Llama, or open-weight models).
• Deep understanding of RAG architectures, vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS, Databricks Vector Databases, pgvector), and embedding models.
• Experience architecting on at least one major cloud platform (Azure, AWS, or GCP), including native AI services (Azure AI Foundry / Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI).
• Proven experience with MLOps/LLMOps: CI/CD, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), observability, and evaluation frameworks.
• Strong grounding in AI governance, security, compliance, and Responsible AI practices.
• Excellent communication skills, with the ability to present architecture to both executives and engineers.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience designing state management and persistent memory for long-running autonomous agents.
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) and emerging AI agent ecosystems.
• Experience with AI observability / evaluation tooling (LangSmith, Ragas, Langfuse, or custom eval harnesses).
• Prior consulting, client-facing, or forward-deployed architecture experience.
• Relevant cloud certifications (Azure AI Engineer/Architect, AWS ML Specialty, Google Professional ML Engineer).
• Experience with NL-to-SQL, knowledge graphs, or GraphRAG-style architecture.

HEALTHCARE DOMAIN PREFERENCE

We strongly prefer candidates who bring healthcare knowledge alongside their AI expertise. Our AI platforms are architected on healthcare distribution and specialty pharmacy data - experience with healthcare distribution, specialty pharma data, or healthcare EMR/EHR systems (HL7, FHIR, claims, NDC-level data) is a significant advantage.

What Cencora offers

We provide compensation, benefits, and resources that enable a highly inclusive culture and support our team members’ ability to live with purpose every day. In addition to traditional offerings like medical, dental, and vision care, we also provide a comprehensive suite of benefits that focus on the physical, emotional, financial, and social aspects of wellness. This encompasses support for working families, which may include backup dependent care, adoption assistance, infertility coverage, family building support, behavioral health solutions, paid parental leave, and paid caregiver leave. To encourage your personal growth, we also offer a variety of training programs, professional development resources, and opportunities to participate in mentorship programs, employee resource groups, volunteer activities, and much more. For details, visit https://www.virtualfairhub.com/cencora

Full time

Equal Employment Opportunity

Cencora is committed to providing equal employment opportunity without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, national origin, age, disability, veteran status or membership in any other class protected by federal, state or local law.

The company’s continued success depends on the full and effective utilization of qualified individuals. Therefore, harassment is prohibited and all matters related to recruiting, training, compensation, benefits, promotions and transfers comply with equal opportunity principles and are non-discriminatory.

Cencora is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities during the employment process which are consistent with legal requirements. If you wish to request an accommodation while seeking employment, please call 888.692.2272 or email [e-mail]. We will make accommodation determinations on a request-by-request basis. Messages and emails regarding anything other than accommodations requests will not be returned

Affiliated Companies

Affiliated Companies: International Oncology Network Solutions Inc