Senior AI Architect & Systems Engineer (Remote)

Cognizant; Southbourne (NC); Remote; USD 130,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical/Dental/Vision/Life Insurance

Paid holidays + PTO

401(k) plan and contributions

Long-term/Short-term Disability

Paid Parental Leave

Employee Stock Purchase Plan

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking a Principal AI Engineer (Remote) to design, build, and scale enterprise-grade AI solutions. You will lead architecture and implementation of agentic multi-agent systems, model orchestration, and AI governance across initiatives.

Lead cross-functional collaboration with data scientists and software engineers to establish reusable patterns, drive engineering standards, and accelerate enterprise AI adoption.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning, or AI engineering, including recent hands-on delivery of production AI or LLM-based solutions.
• Expert-level Python development experience with modern frameworks such as FastAPI, Pydantic, and asynchronous programming patterns.
• Deep hands-on experience with agentic AI frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, Google ADK, or similar orchestration platforms.
• Strong expertise in LLM integration, prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), context management, and evaluation methodologies.
• Experience designing model selection and orchestration strategies that optimize cost, latency, and response quality across AI workloads.
• Practical experience in machine learning, model evaluation, fine-tuning, feature engineering, and statistical analysis.
• Proven experience delivering solutions on cloud platforms using modern MLOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, containers, monitoring, and observability tools.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives, mentor engineers, and produce clear architecture and design documentation.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver scalable agentic and multi-agent AI systems, including orchestration, planning, memory, tool integration, and enterprise platform connectivity.
• Design, develop, and deploy production-grade AI applications, owning technical decisions from proof of concept through operational deployment.
• Build and optimize model orchestration frameworks that intelligently balance cost, latency, performance, and scalability across multiple model providers and AI services.
• Develop robust LLM-powered solutions using prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), context management, structured outputs, and advanced evaluation frameworks.
• Establish AI governance, safety, and responsible AI controls, including guardrails, validation frameworks, traceability, monitoring, auditability, and compliance mechanisms.

Skills

Python development

LLM integration

Agentic AI

Cloud & MLOps

System architecture

Leadership/mentoring

Education

Bachelor's or Master's in CS/DS/Engineering

Tools

LangGraph

LangChain

Google ADK

LiteLLM

TrueFoundry

Bifrost

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Cognizant is seeking a Principal AI Engineer (Remote) to design, build, and scale enterprise-grade AI solutions. You will lead architecture and implementation of agentic multi-agent systems, model orchestration, and AI governance across initiatives.

Lead cross-functional collaboration with data scientists and software engineers to establish reusable patterns, drive engineering standards, and accelerate enterprise AI adoption.