Senior AI-Native Architect: Scalable Backends & Data

WebMD; Newark (NJ); On-site; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance (medical, dental, and

Vision coverage

Paid Time Off

401(k) Retirement Plan with employer

Life and Disability Insurance

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Commuter/Transit Benefits

Job summary

WebMD Ignite, a division of WebMD and Internet Brands, is seeking a Principal Architect, AI-Native Applications to lead architecture across AI-native backends, LLM integration, and data pipelines. This senior role pairs hands-on coding with architecture leadership to drive scalable, secure solutions.

You will define patterns, guardrails, and reference implementations for cloud and on-prem environments, mentor engineers, and ensure HIPAA and PHI compliance while partnering with product and DevOps

Qualifications

• 7+ years in software architecture, backend engineering, or data engineering with senior leadership.
• Experience designing complex distributed backends with microservices, APIs, and event-driven or streaming patterns.
• Hands-on data platforms for AI workloads, including vector stores and semantic retrieval.
• Experience building AI-native or AI-enabled applications with LLM integration, RAG, and orchestration frameworks.
• Strong cloud experience across AWS/Azure/GCP and hybrid (cloud + on‑prem) environments.
• Hands-on coding while providing architecture leadership and mentoring senior engineers.
• Knowledge of healthcare data security, privacy, and HIPAA/PHI handling.

Responsibilities

• Define and own application architecture patterns, standards, and reference implementations across the org.
• Architect complex backend systems including microservices, APIs, and data pipelines.
• Design high-performance data platforms for AI workloads and semantic retrieval over large corpora.
• Establish guardrails for AI-native apps, LLM integration, and multi-model orchestration.
• Conduct architecture reviews ensuring scalability, security, interoperability, and cost.
• Set standards for AI-ready APIs and data services, enabling rapid prototyping and production rollout.
• Partner with engineering, product, data, and DevOps leaders to align tech direction with business outcomes.
• Ensure architectures meet HIPAA and PHI privacy and security requirements across cloud and on-premises.

Skills

Architectural leadership

Backend architecture

AI integration

Cloud platforms

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

WebMD Ignite, a division of WebMD and Internet Brands, is seeking a Principal Architect, AI-Native Applications to lead architecture across AI-native backends, LLM integration, and data pipelines. This senior role pairs hands-on coding with architecture leadership to drive scalable, secure solutions.

You will define patterns, guardrails, and reference implementations for cloud and on-prem environments, mentor engineers, and ensure HIPAA and PHI compliance while partnering with product and DevOps