Principal Enterprise Data & AI Architect

Raymond James Financial, Inc.; Saint Petersburg (FL); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Raymond James Financial, Inc. is seeking a highly technical Principal Data & AI Architect to lead architecture across enterprise data platforms and AI/ML capabilities. You will define reference architectures, drive modernization to cloud-native solutions, and collaborate with security, governance, risk, and business teams to deliver scalable, compliant analytics and AI services.

This hybrid role in St. Petersburg, FL emphasizes production-grade design, agentic data access, and reusable

Qualifications

• Extensive experience in enterprise data architecture and governance.
• Proven track record with cloud-based data platforms and AI architectures.
• Experience with AI/ML platform engineering and MLOps.
• Ability to define reference architectures and guardrails for enterprise use.
• Strong collaboration with security, risk, and business stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Serve as principal architect for enterprise data and AI platforms.
• Define target-state cloud architectures and reference designs.
• Lead modernization from on-premises to scalable cloud platforms.
• Evaluate cloud analytics, AI technologies, and governance tooling.
• Design scalable data ingestion, storage, and retrieval patterns.
• Mentor engineers on architecture patterns and production readiness.

Skills

Enterprise data architecture

AI architecture

Cloud platform experience

LLM Ops

Data governance

Stakeholder influence

Tools

AWS Redshift

Snowflake

Databricks

Neo4j/Neptune

SageMaker/Bedrock

Retrieval-augmented generation

Job description

This position follows our hybrid-friendly schedule, so you get the best of both worlds – flexibility and collaboration. In office days will be 2-3 per week averaging 10-12 days per month in our St Petersburg, FL Corporate Office.

Key Responsibilities and Essential Duties

• Serve as the principal enterprise architect for enterprise data platforms and AI/ML platforms/capabilities, agentic data access, semantic enablement, and data engineering standards.

• Own the architecture strategy, target-state designs, reference architectures, implementation blueprints, technical guardrails, and engineering standards for trusted, governed, scalable data and AI capabilities

• Define target-state architecture for modern cloud-based data and AI platforms, including operational data stores, cloud data warehouses, data lakehouses, data products, semantic layers, AI/ML platforms, vector stores, APIs, agentic data access services, and governed data consumption capabilities.

• Lead core data platform modernization by evaluating legacy and modern platform capabilities, defining workload placement criteria, and guiding migration from on-premises data platforms to scalable, governed, AI-ready cloud platforms.

• Evaluate and recommend cloud data, analytics, AI, semantic, governance, and engineering technologies using decision criteria based on scalability, security, interoperability, performance, resilience, cost, supportability, and enterprise fit.

• Design scalable architecture patterns for data ingestion, transformation, storage, curation, publishing, retrieval, and consumption across batch, streaming, event-driven, real-time, analytics, machine learning, generative AI, and agentic use cases.

• Define architecture patterns for machine learning, generative AI, AI services, intelligent applications, AI-enabled analytics, retrieval-augmented generation, workflow automation, and agentic AI solutions.

• Evolve governed agentic data-access architecture from reference design to production-grade implementation, including agent-safe tools and API adapters that are read-optimized, entitled, audited, secure, and appropriate for regulated enterprise use.

• Drive architecture reviews for data and AI initiatives, identifying design risks, integration gaps, scalability concerns, governance needs, operational readiness issues, supportability gaps, and opportunities for reuse.

• Define non-functional requirements for data and AI solutions, including scalability, performance, latency, availability, resilience, observability, maintainability, cost efficiency, and operational supportability.

• Translate complex business, data, and AI requirements into practical architecture roadmaps, implementation patterns, reusable engineering frameworks, and migration plans.

• Partner closely with Enterprise Architecture, Enterprise Data & Analytics, AI execution teams, data engineering, data science, analytics, cloud/platform engineering, application teams, security, risk, compliance, governance, and business stakeholders.

• Mentor engineers, architects, and delivery teams on architecture patterns, AI/data design practices, engineering standards, operational readiness, and production-grade solution delivery.

Required Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in data architecture, enterprise architecture, cloud data architecture, data engineering architecture, AI architecture, ML architecture, or related senior technology roles.

• Deep expertise in enterprise data architecture, including data engineering, data lakehouse architecture, data lakes, data products, metadata, lineage, data quality, semantic layers, and governed data access.

• Strong engineering and architecture experience with analytical/AI cloud-based data platforms such as AWS Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery or comparable technologies.

• Strong engineering and architecture experience with operational cloud-based data platforms such as Aurora, Postgres, Dynamo DB and Graph data platforms such as Neo4J, Neptune and related technologies.

• Strong AI/ML platform engineering and architecture experience with AWS Sagemaker, AWS Bedrock , Vector databases like Open Search, ML Ops and LLM Ops

• Experience defining agent design patterns, AI/data reference architectures, reusable frameworks, technical guardrails, engineering standards, and production-ready architecture patterns.

• Deep expertise in agentic AI and LLM application architecture, including cloud-native AI/ML platform integration, model selection, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, tool/API integration, context and memory management, orchestration patterns, and production-grade frameworks for building scalable AI solutions. Familiarity with MCP-based tooling, Agent Harness or equivalent technologies is preferred.

• Strong understanding of data governance, AI governance, privacy, security, access controls, auditability, regulatory expectations, model risk, and operational risk in enterprise environments.

• Experience designing AI-ready data architectures that support analytics, machine learning, generative AI, enterprise search, intelligent applications, AI agents, and operational AI use cases.

• Ability to influence senior stakeholders and explain complex data and AI architecture concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

• Experience in wealth management, financial services, brokerage, asset management industries.

Ideal Candidate Profile

• The ideal candidate is a deeply technical Principal Data & AI Architect who can lead architecture across enterprise data platforms, AI/ML solutions, agentic data access, semantic and AI context architecture.

• This person should be strong enough in data architecture to design the trusted cloud data foundation required for analytics and AI, and strong enough in AI architecture to guide how AI agents, machine learning, generative AI, retrieval systems, and intelligent applications are integrated, governed, deployed, monitored, and scaled.

• This is not a generalist architect role. It requires strong data engineering/architecture depth, practical AI/ML architecture experience, cloud platform expertise, production engineering discipline, and the ability to influence across data, AI, cloud, engineering, security, governance, risk, compliance, and business teams.