Head of Enterprise AI & Data Architecture

Patra Corporation; Texas; On-site; USD 210,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Patra Corporation is seeking a Sr. Director-level AI Architect to lead the AI & Data Architecture function. You will own strategy, staffing, and enterprise architecture for data, AI, and platform capabilities across the organization.

You will design document-intensive and unstructured data solutions, govern AI usage and observability, and partner with senior leadership across Engineering, Product, Security, Compliance, and BI to deliver reliable AI-enabled workflows.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive experience across software engineering, enterprise architecture, data engineering, cloud platforms, AI, or ML, including leading senior professionals.
• Experience forming, scaling, and leading multidisciplinary engineering and data organizations.
• Experience hiring, developing managers, evaluating performance, and allocating resources across teams.
• Deep understanding of production AI systems including LLM applications, RAG, embeddings, vector search, agentic architectures, evaluation, observability, governance, and human-in-the-loop systems.
• Significant experience directing architecture for platforms supporting structured, semi-structured, and unstructured enterprise data.
• Experience establishing strategy around AWS-native data services and platforms such as Snowflake and/or Databricks.
• Strong understanding of operational, analytical, event-oriented, and semantic data architectures and their trade-offs.
• Experience leading organizations responsible for reliability, security, performance, and operational readiness.
• Experience establishing enterprise standards around data quality, ownership, lineage, retention, tenant segregation, access control, auditability, and lifecycle management.
• Experience operating in regulated environments where data residency, privacy, and jurisdiction requirements influence architecture.

Responsibilities

• Lead the AI & Data Architecture function. Own the strategy, organization, technical direction, priorities, delivery, quality, and operating model.
• Form and lead the organization, staffing requirements, and multidisciplinary teams across AI and data domains.
• Manage talent and performance, set objectives, evaluate, and develop leaders within the team.
• Own enterprise AI and data architecture, defining target-state data ingestion, governance, modeling, storage, and consumption.
• Direct architecture for document-intensive and unstructured domains, setting standards for ingestion, metadata extraction, indexing, and semantic retrieval.
• Industrialize the Agentic AI platform, evolving production-grade infrastructure for agent orchestration, tool integration, retrieval-augmented generation, and observability.
• Own AI evaluation and data strategy, including training, benchmarking, versioning, and access controls.
• Treat AI observability as a strategic data asset with governance for event streams, model interactions, and cost signals.
• Lead enterprise data platform strategy, including AWS services, Snowflake, and Databricks, for cloud-native data capabilities.
• Establish enterprise data standards, governance, and reuse of platform capabilities across product teams.
• Build governance into architecture with data ownership, lineage, quality, and security controls.
• Protect customer and tenant data with multi-tenant segregation and secure architecture.
• Own jurisdiction-resident data architecture with retention, archival, and deletion policies.
• Set quality and reliability expectations with SLAs/SLOs for data assets and AI services.
• Direct the development of reusable platform capabilities spanning identity, access, observability, security, and data services.
• Direct enterprise integration architecture for Patra products and partner platforms.
• Run AI and data capabilities as enterprise products with adoption and value metrics.
• Own architecture governance and provide executive-level decision support.

Skills

AI architecture

Leadership

Staffing

Data architecture

Cloud platforms

Governance

Vector search

Executive communication

Tools

AWS (S3, Redshift)

Snowflake

Databricks

CI/CD

Job description

Patra Corporation is seeking a Sr. Director-level AI Architect to lead the AI & Data Architecture function. You will own strategy, staffing, and enterprise architecture for data, AI, and platform capabilities across the organization.

You will design document-intensive and unstructured data solutions, govern AI usage and observability, and partner with senior leadership across Engineering, Product, Security, Compliance, and BI to deliver reliable AI-enabled workflows.