Principal AI Software Architect

Versique Executive, Professional & Interim Recruiting; Denver (CO); On-site; USD 150,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive benefits package

Job summary

Versique Executive, Professional & Interim Recruiting is seeking a role within its AI-forward engineering team. The position focuses on defining and upholding engineering standards for safe, auditable AI-enabled software delivery at scale.

You will own generator-verifier architectures, AI agent orchestration, and evaluation-driven development while ensuring robust security and governance across autonomous workflows.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and operating distributed systems with real impact.
• Proven success building deployment pipelines, testing frameworks, and observability.

Responsibilities

• Define and uphold engineering standards for AI-enabled software delivery.
• Lead generator-verifier architectures and AI agent orchestration frameworks.
• Shape evaluation-driven development and secure, auditable CI/CD pipelines.
• Establish security boundaries, least-privilege controls, and compliance guardrails.
• Serve as the final human accountability gate and governance model owner.

Skills

Large-Scale Systems

CI/CD Pipelines

Production AI/LLM

Security Architecture

Technical Leadership

Governance & Review

Job description

Job Summary

A leading SaaS technology organization serving thousands of highly regulated and public-facing organizations is scaling an AI-native software development model across its engineering teams. Within the Office of the CTO, the company operates a production engineering environment where autonomous AI agents perform high-confidence implementation tasks while senior engineers orchestrate, validate, and maintain accountability for outcomes. This role joins a team responsible for advancing that model at scale. Engineering practices emphasize generator-verifier architectures, evaluation-driven development, staged deployments, and high-volume autonomous pull request workflows operating within strict security and compliance boundaries. The organization is seeking experienced practitioners who can define and uphold engineering standards for AI-enabled software delivery, rather than simply leverage AI tools.

Location: Remote

Salary: $150K-$180K

Benefits information: Competitive benefits package

Operating Principles (Non-Negotiable)

• AI agents operate only within controlled development branches.
• All AI-generated code must undergo senior engineer review before production deployment.
• Engineers retain full accountability for outcomes.
• Compliance requirements are treated as foundational engineering requirements and competitive differentiators.

Why This Role Exists

Scaling autonomous software development safely, securely, and auditably is significantly more challenging than demonstrating it. This role owns the architecture, processes, and controls that enable high-volume AI-assisted software delivery without sacrificing quality, security, or compliance.

The Position Is Responsible For

• Generator-verifier architectures
• AI agent orchestration frameworks
• Evaluation-driven development practices
• CI/CD pipelines optimized for autonomous pull request workflows
• Secure model inference and isolated execution environments
• Human review and governance processes that ensure accountability.

This individual serves as a key technical authority responsible for setting engineering standards adopted across multiple delivery teams.

What You'll Do

Own the Generator-Verifier Architecture

• Design and evolve systems where AI-generated changes are validated through automated testing, evaluation frameworks, security scanning, and policy enforcement.

Define AI Agent Orchestration Patterns

• Establish approaches for task decomposition, dispatch, sandboxing, execution, and secure state management across agent ecosystems.

Build and Operate Scalable CI/CD Systems

• Develop delivery pipelines capable of handling large volumes of AI-generated pull requests while maintaining efficient and effective human review.

Establish Evaluation-Driven Development

• Create measurable acceptance criteria that enable objective validation of system changes.

Own Security Architecture

• Design secure execution boundaries, least-privilege access controls, secrets management practices, and compliance-driven engineering guardrails.

Serve as the Final Human Accountability Gate

• Define and enforce review standards ensuring no AI-generated code reaches production without appropriate human oversight.

Define Engineering Standards

• Establish branching strategies, deployment practices, review protocols, evaluation frameworks, and reference implementations used across teams.

Govern Graduated Autonomy

• Define criteria that determine when workflows are ready to advance from supervised to more autonomous execution models.

Ownership from Day One

• Generator-verifier workflows and orchestration frameworks
• CI/CD systems supporting autonomous development pipelines
• Secure AI execution environments and architectural boundaries
• Evaluation frameworks, branching strategies, and review processes.

Required

What We're Looking For

Large-Scale Systems Architecture

• Experience designing and operating distributed systems, developer platforms, and CI/CD ecosystems with significant business and operational impact.

Developer Platform & CI/CD Expertise

• Proven success building highly reliable deployment pipelines, testing frameworks, staged deployment strategies, observability platforms, and rollback mechanisms.

Production AI/LLM Experience

• Hands-on experience operating AI agents in production environments, including orchestration, tool integrations, evaluation frameworks, sandboxing, and reliability management.

Security Architecture Experience

• Expertise in least-privilege design, secrets management, network security, threat modeling, and audit-ready systems.

Technical Leadership

• Demonstrated success defining engineering standards, frameworks, or operating models adopted by multiple teams.

Effective Governance

• Ability to create review processes that maintain both accountability and development velocity.

Preferred

• Experience operating within highly regulated or audited environments.
• Strong understanding of security and compliance control frameworks.
• Experience with cloud-native AI infrastructure operating within compliance boundaries.
• Experience with evaluation-driven development methodologies and generator-verifier architectures.
• Background working within advanced AI, platform engineering, or large-scale software organizations.

Ideal Candidate Profile

You Are Likely a Strong Fit If You

• View safe and auditable autonomy as a critical engineering challenge.
• Hold strong, evidence-based perspectives on reliability and operational resilience.
• Prefer objective evaluation and measurement over subjective assessment.
• Treat compliance requirements as engineering design inputs rather than administrative tasks.
• Enjoy creating standards and frameworks that influence the work of many teams.

This Role May Not Be the Right Fit If...

• You prefer direct feature development over platform, architecture, or governance work.
• You view compliance as primarily administrative rather than technical.
• You prioritize speed over demonstrable security and safety controls.
• You believe autonomous systems should operate without human review and oversight.
• You are uncomfortable enforcing governance standards when reliability metrics do not support greater autonomy.

About Versique

Versique: /ver-seek/?adj. being both versatile and unique; n. a high-performance recruiting firm specializing in executive leadership search, direct hire, and interim hiring solutions.

Versique Executive, Professional, & Interim Recruiting is a locally owned and operated hiring and placement firm based in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. With specialized practice areas across our three divisions, Versique delivers tailored expertise to a wide range of industries. What sets us apart is our team of recruiters—seasoned professionals who have worked in the very fields they now hire for, providing unmatched industry insight and connections.

We believe people are more than resumes—they are transformative, unlocking the potential for organizational growth and success.

Versique is proud to be an award-winning company, earning recognition on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies and the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal's Fast 50 list for 2023. We are also consistently recognized as a Star Tribune Top Workplace and were named a Best Place to Work in 2022 by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.

Let's find your people, together.

Versique is an equal-opportunity employer committed to creating a diverse workforce. We consider all qualified applicants regardless of race, religion, color, sex, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or veteran status