Secure Onsite AI Architect - Enterprise LLM & RAG

Sara’s Market & Bakery; Colorado Springs (CO); On-site; USD 145,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision, disability, &

Generous PTO program

Tuition & certification reimbursement

Flexible work schedules

Employee bonuses

401(k) match

ESOP

Job summary

Scientific Applications & Research Associates, Inc. (SARA) is seeking an AI Architect to join the Colorado Springs team. The role blends hands-on architecture with leadership to deploy secure, production-ready AI workflows and govern their lifecycle.

You will partner with senior leadership to advance enterprise AI strategy, drive high-value use cases, and ensure robust security and governance across on-premises and private cloud environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field.
• 8–10 years of professional AI/software/enterprise experience.
• 5+ years leading complex technical initiatives, including architecture and delivery.
• Hands-on experience deploying and integrating AI systems.
• Proven ability to deliver beyond PoC.
• Strong understanding of LLMs and generative AI concepts, capabilities, limitations, and architectural tradeoffs.
• Experience with LLM deployment, RAG architectures, embedding models, vector databases, on-prem/private cloud/hybrid AI infrastructure, enterprise data systems (SQL, docs, APIs).
• Authentication, authorization, and secure application integration; evaluation/monitoring of LLM apps and infra.
• Proficiency in Python (or similar) and familiarity with AI tooling ecosystems (Open WebUI, LangChain, LlamaIndex).
• Familiarity with MCP and client-server architecture; model lifecycle management; security technologies (JWT, OAuth, LDAP, API keys).
• Understanding of GPU infrastructure, inference performance, capacity planning, cost tradeoffs; data governance and security.
• Ability to collaborate with senior architect and independent initiative; strong communication across technical/non-technical audiences.
• U.S. citizen with ability to obtain DoD security clearance.

Responsibilities

• Partner with the current AI Architect to advance enterprise AI strategy and standards.
• Lead assigned AI initiatives from discovery through deployment and ongoing support.
• Identify, prioritize, and deliver high-value AI use cases with stakeholders.
• Architect, implement, and maintain secure onsite/private LLM deployments.
• Evaluate and select AI tools and architectures based on capability, security, and cost.
• Design Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipelines and enterprise data integrations.
• Develop secure integrations with enterprise apps, databases, and MCP interfaces; contribute to reusable platform capabilities.
• Collaborate with IT and cybersecurity to meet security and governance requirements.
• Establish evaluation methods for model quality, retrieval accuracy, and business outcomes.
• Develop and maintain AI usage guidelines and technical documentation; support training and adoption.
• Monitor deployed AI systems and improve performance, usability, resource utilization, and business value.

Skills

Leadership

Communication

Collaboration

Security awareness

Problem solving

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Python

Open WebUI

LangChain

LlamaIndex

JWT

OAuth

LDAP

Job description

Scientific Applications & Research Associates, Inc. (SARA) is seeking an AI Architect to join the Colorado Springs team. The role blends hands-on architecture with leadership to deploy secure, production-ready AI workflows and govern their lifecycle.

You will partner with senior leadership to advance enterprise AI strategy, drive high-value use cases, and ensure robust security and governance across on-premises and private cloud environments.