Principal AI & Cloud Architect for Production-Grade Systems

Publicis Groupe; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Publicis Digital Experience seeks a Principal Engineer, AI/ML & Cloud to serve as the top technical authority for customer‑facing AI capabilities and the cloud platform that powers them. You will define the reference architecture for Generative and Agentic AI, establish engineering standards, and personally deliver the highest‑leverage components of the system.

You will lead architecture decisions across AI/data science and platform engineering teams, mentor as a principal individual

Qualifications

• 13+ years of experience across ML engineering, data engineering, and large‑scale distributed systems, including deep architecture experience.
• 3+ years of hands‑on experience designing and shipping Generative/Agentic AI systems in production.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a Principal‑level individual contributor—setting technical direction, owning architecture, influencing multiple teams without direct people‑management authority.
• Track record of being the technical decision‑maker on high‑stakes platform and AI initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Own the end‑to‑end technical architecture for the AI platform—from data foundations through model serving, retrieval, and agent orchestration.
• Define reference architectures, engineering standards, and paved-path patterns that AI and platform teams build against.
• Make and document high‑stakes build/buy, model‑selection, and platform decisions for senior leadership.
• Lead the analysis and design of new AI capabilities for the marketing platform as per business strategy.
• Set the standard for development environment, tooling, and AI‑assisted engineering workflow across teams.
• Partner with QA, product, data science and production support to bring AI features to market and resolve issues.
• Establish monitoring, cost‑governance and reliability practices for production AI systems.
• Guide platform, security, and upgrade strategy for AI and cloud estate.

Skills

AI architecture

Distributed systems

Cloud architecture

Python

Stakeholder engagement

LLMOps / MLOps

Tools

AWS

Oracle on‑prem

Terraform

Docker

Kubernetes

Spark/PySpark

Databricks

Airflow

MLflow

Job description

Publicis Digital Experience seeks a Principal Engineer, AI/ML & Cloud to serve as the top technical authority for customer‑facing AI capabilities and the cloud platform that powers them. You will define the reference architecture for Generative and Agentic AI, establish engineering standards, and personally deliver the highest‑leverage components of the system.

You will lead architecture decisions across AI/data science and platform engineering teams, mentor as a principal individual