Senior AI Architecture & Platform Lead

Cognizant; Atlanta (GA); Hybrid; USD 122,000 - 224,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

401(k) plan

Employee stock purchase plan

Learning and development programs

Paid holidays and PTO

Job summary

Cognizant is seeking an Associate Director, AI Architecture and Engineering Lead to translate business priorities into secure, scalable AI platforms and customer-facing solutions. You will collaborate with product, data, cloud, security, risk, legal, leaders, engineering teams, and clients in a global consulting environment.

Hybrid work: 3 days a week in an Atlanta, GA office. You will define target architectures, lead architecture through deployment, build model-agnostic AI solutions, and

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software, platform, data, or cloud engineering experience including 5+ years in architecture or technical leadership with enterprise-scale AI systems.
• Hands-on expertise in LLM application engineering, agents, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, guardrails, distributed systems, cloud architecture, and multiple model providers.
• Experience establishing secure, reliable AI platform and LLMOps practices, including CI/CD, observability, automated evaluation, incident response, privacy, security, governance, resilience, and cost optimization.
• Experience guiding modern full-stack and distributed-system engineering using Angular and TypeScript, C# and .NET, APIs and events, PostgreSQL or AlloyDB, Redis, vector or graph stores, containers, and Google Cloud services.
• Strong executive communication, client-facing leadership, cross-functional collaboration, mentoring, and technical decision-making skills.

Responsibilities

• Define and govern target architectures, reference patterns, reusable services, and engineering standards for enterprise AI.
• Lead solutions from discovery and architecture through implementation, evaluation, deployment, and production operations.
• Architect model-agnostic AI solutions using frontier and open models, stateful agents, multi-agent workflows, tool calling, memory, and secure enterprise integrations.
• Establish AI platform and LLMOps practices covering prompt/versioning, automated evaluation, CI/CD, observability, rollback, incident response, latency, reliability, cost optimization, and responsible-AI controls.
• Lead, mentor, and develop architects and engineers while partnering with cross-functional leaders to prioritize use cases, assess vendors, strengthen engineering quality, and deliver measurable outcomes.

Skills

Executive communication

Client-facing leadership

Mentoring

Technical decision-making

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Angular

TypeScript

C#

.NET

APIs

PostgreSQL

AlloyDB

Redis

Vector stores

Graph stores

Containers

Google Cloud

Job description

Cognizant is seeking an Associate Director, AI Architecture and Engineering Lead to translate business priorities into secure, scalable AI platforms and customer-facing solutions. You will collaborate with product, data, cloud, security, risk, legal, leaders, engineering teams, and clients in a global consulting environment.

Hybrid work: 3 days a week in an Atlanta, GA office. You will define target architectures, lead architecture through deployment, build model-agnostic AI solutions, and