Senior Enterprise AI Architect — Lead Production Open-Weight Models

Straive; Newark (NJ); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Hybrid work arrangement

Job summary

Straive seeks a Principal AI Architect — Enterprise AI Delivery in Newark, NJ. This full-time role (hybrid, 3 days on-site) leads AI delivery programs, governs architecture, and guides open-weight model production across client environments.

You will own production-ready standards, fine-tune open-weight models, and optimize cost and performance while collaborating with sales and consulting on client engagements and feasibility studies.

Qualifications

• Proven production-scale AI systems deployment.
• Experience fine-tuning open-weight models for production using LoRA/QLoRA.
• Ability to reduce cost or improve latency with quantization, distillation, routing, caching, or serving changes.
• Treat evals as infrastructure with offline suites, CI regression gates, and online monitoring.
• Assess data readiness and governance for enterprise data estates.

Responsibilities

• Set reference AI system architecture deployed at client environments.
• Own production standards: design reviews, automated testing, quality gates, release readiness.
• Define open-weight model engineering and unit economics, fine-tuning decisions, and serving strategy.
• Lead 30+ engineers and data scientists across concurrent client implementations; build reusable IP.
• Collaborate with sales and consulting on client workshops, proposals, effort and cost estimation.

Skills

Open source AI

Open-weight model

LoRA/QLoRA

Python

NIST AI RMF

ISO/IEC 42001

EU AI Act risk tiers

Education

Degree in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

Kubernetes

CI/CD

Job description

Straive seeks a Principal AI Architect — Enterprise AI Delivery in Newark, NJ. This full-time role (hybrid, 3 days on-site) leads AI delivery programs, governs architecture, and guides open-weight model production across client environments.

You will own production-ready standards, fine-tune open-weight models, and optimize cost and performance while collaborating with sales and consulting on client engagements and feasibility studies.