Senior AI Platform Architect & Tech Leader

Kai; San Jose (CA); On-site; USD 240,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Equity options

Supportive work environment

Job summary

Kai is seeking an experienced technical leader to spearhead the AI platform engineering team. You will set engineering standards, design architecture, shape testing and deployment practices, and build a team that can scale AI services from working to reliable and maintainable.

This role partners with AI scientists and backend engineers to drive strategic technical decisions. You will work directly with the Head of AI and engineering leadership, writing code, reviewing architecture, and mentoring

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience with at least 2 years in technical leadership or staff+ role.
• MS in Computer Science, AI, or related field; PhD preferred.
• Deep software architecture expertise and production systems ownership at scale.
• Strong Python expertise with clean architecture and async patterns.
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure preferred) and containerized microservices.

Responsibilities

• Audit and roadmap: produce an engineering roadmap with high-impact improvements.
• Establish engineering foundations: design shared library architecture, coding standards, and quality gates.
• Build testing infrastructure: define testing strategy for LLM-enabled services and CI integration.
• Consolidate CI/CD: design parameterized pipelines, staging, canary, and rollback.
• Fix critical production issues and drive reliability patterns.
• Own architecture decisions across the AI platform and API contracts.
• Lead AI team hiring and mentor engineers and AI scientists in engineering practices.
• Define evaluation and reliability frameworks for LLM-powered features.
• Collaborate with backend to integrate AI services with core platform.

Skills

Python

Software architecture

System design

Cloud platforms

CI/CD

Mentorship

Communication

Leadership

Education

MS in Computer Science

PhD preferred

Tools

Azure

OpenAI API

Cosmos DB

Job description

Kai is seeking an experienced technical leader to spearhead the AI platform engineering team. You will set engineering standards, design architecture, shape testing and deployment practices, and build a team that can scale AI services from working to reliable and maintainable.

This role partners with AI scientists and backend engineers to drive strategic technical decisions. You will work directly with the Head of AI and engineering leadership, writing code, reviewing architecture, and mentoring