Senior Consulting Manager - AI Architecture & Engineering

Cognizant

New Jersey

Hybrid

USD 99,000 - 183,000

Full time

2 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) plan

Employee stock purchase plan

Learning and development certificates

Paid holidays and PTO

Parental leave

Job summary

Cognizant Consulting in New Jersey is seeking a Senior Manager Consulting, AI Architecture and Engineering to translate business priorities into secure, scalable AI platforms and customer-facing solutions. You’ll lead architecture, design reviews, and production-ready implementations across enterprise AI initiatives.

You will collaborate with product, data, cloud, security, risk, legal and client teams, establishing AI platform practices, model governance, and cost optimization while mentoring

Qualifications

12+ years of software, platform, data, or cloud engineering experience with leadership in architecture or engineering.
Hands-on expertise in LLM application engineering, agents, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, guardrails, and distributed systems.
Experience establishing secure, reliable AI platforms, CI/CD, observability, incident response, privacy, governance, and cost optimization.
Experience guiding modern full-stack and distributed-system engineering using modern frameworks and cloud services.
Strong executive communication, client-facing leadership, collaboration, and decision-making skills.

Responsibilities

Define and govern target architectures, reference patterns, reusable services, and standards for enterprise AI platforms.
Lead solutions from discovery to production, while participating in design reviews and prototyping.
Architect model-agnostic AI solutions using frontier models, agents, memory, and secure enterprise integrations.
Establish AI platform and LLMOps practices including versioning, evaluation, CI/CD, observability, and cost control.
Mentor architects and engineers and partner with leaders to prioritize use cases, assess vendors, and deliver measurable outcomes.

Skills

LLM app engineering

Agents

RAG retrieval-augmented generation

CI/CD

Cloud architecture

Security & governance

Executive communication

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

LangGraph

Semantic Kernel

LangChain

LlamaIndex

GraphRAG

Kubernetes

Job description

About Cognizant Consulting

Cognizant Consulting is more than Cognizant's consulting practice - we're a global community of 5,000+ experts dedicated to helping clients reimagine their business. Blending our deep industry and technology advisory capability, we create innovative business solutions for Fortune 500 clients. And now, we're looking for our next colleague who'll join us in shaping the future of business. Could it be you?

About the role

As a Senior Manager Consulting, AI Architecture and Engineering, you will make an impact by translating business priorities into secure, scalable, production-grade AI platforms and customer-facing solutions. You will be a valued member of the consulting team and work collaboratively with product, data, cloud, security, risk, legal, business leaders, engineering teams, and clients.

In this role, you will:

Define and govern target architectures, reference patterns, reusable services, and engineering standards for enterprise AI, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic applications, and AI-enabled digital products.
Lead solutions from discovery and architecture through implementation, evaluation, deployment, and production operations, while remaining hands-on in design reviews, prototyping, troubleshooting, and critical technical decisions.
Architect model-agnostic AI solutions using frontier and open models, stateful agents, multi-agent workflows, tool calling, memory, human approvals, Model Context Protocol, vector or graph retrieval, and secure enterprise integrations.
Establish AI platform and LLMOps practices covering prompt and model 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, manage tradeoffs, assess vendors, strengthen engineering quality, and deliver measurable customer, employee, and operational outcomes.

Work model

We believe hybrid work is the way forward as we strive to provide flexibility wherever possible. Based on this role's business requirements, this is a hybrid position requiring 3 days a week in a client or Cognizant office in New Jersey, NJ. Regardless of your working arrangement, we are here to support a healthy work-life balance through our various wellbeing programs.

The working arrangements for this role are accurate as of the date of posting. This may change based on the project you're engaged in, as well as business and client requirements. Rest assured, we will always be clear about role expectations.

What you must have to be considered

12+ years of software, platform, data, or cloud engineering experience, including 5+ years in architecture or technical leadership, with demonstrated delivery of enterprise-scale production 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 such as Vertex AI, Gemini, Cloud Run, GKE, Pub/Sub, IAM, and Cloud Monitoring.
Strong executive communication, client-facing leadership, cross-functional collaboration, mentoring, and technical decision-making skills.

These will help you succeed

Experience with LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, LangChain, LlamaIndex, GraphRAG, or comparable frameworks.
Experience applying AI-native and specification-driven engineering practices, including coding agents, repository instructions, reusable skills, automated testing, security checks, validation gates, architecture decisions, and requirement-to-code traceability.
Ability to assess emerging AI technologies and vendors, manage technical and business tradeoffs, and connect architecture decisions to measurable outcomes.
Ability to build engineering standards, lead design and code reviews, and develop communities of practice.
Experience operating in complex consulting or enterprise environments with accountability for delivery quality, operational reliability, security, and cost.

We're excited to meet people who share our mission and can make an impact in a variety of ways. Think about your transferable experiences and unique skills that make you stand out as someone who can bring new and exciting things to this role.

Compensation

$98,853 - $182,500

This position is eligible for Cognizant's discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant's applicable plans.

Benefits