Senior AI Systems Architect

Robots & Pencils; United States; On-site; USD 166,000 - 228,000; Full time

Job summary

Robots & Pencils is seeking a Principal Architect to lead the design and delivery of complex, multi-domain systems spanning cloud, data, and AI. You will own architectural direction and serve as the senior technical voice on engagements, guiding cross-functional teams and client strategies.

You will define architectures across cloud infra, data platforms, and AI/ML workloads, mentor engineers, and drive secure, scalable, and compliant solutions.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 5 years in technical leadership roles.
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms and cloud-native architectures (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Strong background in microservices, serverless, containers, and event-driven systems (Kubernetes, Docker, Lambda, EventBridge).
• Proficiency with infrastructure as code and CI/CD (Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, GitHub Actions).

Responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and lead architectural design across cloud, data, and AI/ML systems for end-to-end engagements.
• Architect scalable cloud-native solutions, including multi-cloud and hybrid strategies (AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes).
• Design data architectures including warehouses, data lakes, and pipelines for batch and streaming workloads (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Spark, Kafka).
• Design AI/ML systems including model serving, MLOps pipelines, feature stores, and LLM-based applications (SageMaker, Vertex AI, MLflow, Hugging Face).
• Define infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and DevOps standards across engagements (Terraform, CloudFormation, GitHub Actions).
• Drive performance, scalability, cost, and reliability optimization across deployed systems.
• Ensure architecture meets security, governance, and compliance requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, SOC2).
• Lead cloud migrations and platform modernization initiatives.
• Bring an AI-forward mindset to your daily work, using tools like Claude, Cursor, and other modern AI assistants to ship higher-quality work at pace.

Skills

Architectural leadership

Cloud-native architectures

Multi-cloud

AI/ML systems

Data architectures

DevOps / CI-CD

Python

Tools

AWS

Azure

GCP

Kubernetes

Terraform

CloudFormation

Pulumi

GitHub Actions

Snowflake

BigQuery

Spark

Kafka

SageMaker

Vertex AI

MLflow

Hugging Face

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Robots & Pencils is seeking a Principal Architect to lead the design and delivery of complex, multi-domain systems spanning cloud, data, and AI. You will own architectural direction and serve as the senior technical voice on engagements, guiding cross-functional teams and client strategies.

You will define architectures across cloud infra, data platforms, and AI/ML workloads, mentor engineers, and drive secure, scalable, and compliant solutions.