AI Lead & C4 System Architect

Highbrow LLC; California; On-site; USD 150,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

Highbrow LLC is seeking a Senior Architect to lead enterprise AI initiatives, multimodal systems, and distributed workflows. The role focuses on defining architecture using the C4 model, guiding delivery teams, and shaping production-grade agentic AI solutions, backend microservices, and cloud infrastructure.

You will oversee end-to-end technical leadership in a fast-paced enterprise environment in California, mentoring engineers and ensuring architectural excellence across projects.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least 2+ years in a technical leadership or principal-level capacity.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary technical decision-maker and lead architect across enterprise AI initiatives, multimodal systems, and distributed workflow platforms.
• Define and maintain system architecture using the C4 model across Context, Container, Component, and Code diagrams.
• Direct delivery engineering teams and align technical strategy with client leadership.
• Build and manage agentic AI harnesses, backend microservices, and cloud infrastructure for production-grade systems.

Skills

C4 Architecture & System Design

AI/ML Integration

Understanding of digital broadcast/vis

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

FastAPI

Terraform

Job description

Must Have Skils: C4 Architecture & System Design, AI/ML Integration, Understanding of digital broadcast/visual media production operations

• Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least 2+ years in a technical leadership or principal-level capacity.
• AI/ML Integration: Proven experience building agentic workflows, prompt engineering, integrating LLMs/VLMs into production systems, and utilizing AI evaluation frameworks.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Deep, hands-on expertise with AWS, Azure, and/or GCP serverless architectures.
• Backend Engineering: Expert-level Python proficiency. Experience building high-throughput APIs using FastAPI, managing database migrations, and handling async/multiprocessing workflows.
• DevOps & SDLC: Knowledge of Terraform IaC and CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GHA).
• Domain Knowledge: Strong domain understanding of digital broadcast production operations and with Visual media workflows is highly desirable.
• Architecture: Strong expertise with the C4 architecture model , enterprise integration patterns and multimodel AI Orchestration.

Job Responsibilities

Serves as the primary technical decision-maker and lead architect across enterprise AI initiatives, multimodal systems, and distributed workflow platforms. Responsible for end-to-end technical leadership, defining and maintaining system architecture using the C4 model, directing delivery teams, and guiding the development of production-grade agentic AI harnesses, backend microservices, and cloud infrastructure.

Core Responsibilities

System Architecture & C4 Modeling: Define and maintain C4 model architecture diagrams (Context, Container, Component, Code) for distributed workflows. Oversee architectural reviews and code quality standards for standard microservices and non-deterministic AI agent outputs.

Agentic AI & Multimodal System Design: Build and manage agentic AI harnesses from scratch (tool use, multi-step chaining, reasoning, RAG, sandboxing, state management). Integrate LLMs, VLMs, and specialized APIs for automated asset manipulation and enterprise workflow automation.

Backend & Distributed Systems: Design scalable, high-throughput backend microservices using Python and FastAPI on cloud serverless infrastructure. Architect distributed event-driven workflows using cloud message queues, streams, and event buses (e.g., AWS EventBridge, SQS, DynamoDB Streams)

AI Evaluation, Safety & Quality: Establish AI evaluation frameworks (offline regression evals, rubric scoring, AI-as-judge) and deterministic guardrails/content filters to prevent drift and hallucination.

Team Leadership: Direct delivery engineering teams and align technical strategy and execution roadmaps with client leadership.