Senior Principal AI Platform Architect

Vertex Pharmaceuticals Incorporated

Boston (MA)

Hybrid

USD 188,000 - 282,000

Full time

14 days+

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Job summary

Vertex is seeking a Sr. Principal AI Engineer to define and build the enterprise AI platform powering intelligent applications. You will lead design of scalable, secure, and reusable AI capabilities with a focus on RAG, orchestration, evaluation systems, and a centralized Control Tower for governance and safety.

You will mentor teams, set technical standards, and collaborate across product, security, and UX to enable broad Vertex AI adoption.

Qualifications

Advanced degree in Computer Science, Engineering, AI, ML, or related field; or equivalent mix of education and experience.
10+ years designing enterprise-grade AI/ML platforms and distributed systems.
Deep expertise in agentic AI architectures and LLM-based applications.
Experience with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and vector search.
Experience with AI orchestration frameworks and multi-step agent execution.
Proven ability to design centralized platforms for monitoring, governance and observability.
Experience using AI-assisted development and coding agents for complex systems.
Knowledge of AI-native software engineering practices and governance standards.
Ability to define architecture, standards and reusable services for large environments.
Strong communication and leadership with cross-functional influence.

Responsibilities

Define the technical vision, architecture, and roadmap for Vertex's enterprise agentic AI platform.
Design and build reusable platform services to enable safe, scalable AI-powered apps.
Lead architecture and implementation for RAG pipelines, knowledge retrieval, workflows, and agent orchestration.
Establish frameworks for agent lifecycle management including deployment, observability, and evaluation.
Develop a centralized AI Control Tower/Gateway for monitoring, policy enforcement, and governance.
Build scalable infrastructure patterns for model integration, data access, and orchestration services.
Partner with product, engineering, data, security, and UX teams to deliver platform capabilities.
Set best practices for reliability, evaluation, safety, and performance of AI platforms.
Drive API standards, contracts, architectures, and reusable components.
Mentor engineers and influence cross-functional teams; align with enterprise requirements.