Sr/Distinguished Architect, Semantic Systems & Compilers

Burtch Works; United States; Remote; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

The client is an AI-first enterprise software company seeking a Senior / Distinguished Architect to lead semantic systems and compiler efforts. This deeply hands‑on, individual‑contributor role works closely with CTO and senior leaders on DSLs, compilers, and formal specification.

You will design typed representations, enable AI integration, and build production‑grade tooling to translate complex business requirements into executable software at scale.

Qualifications

• 15+ years of deep software engineering experience and senior IC track record.
• Proven ability to design and scale enterprise software platforms.
• Strong background in DSLs, compilers, and formal methods.

Responsibilities

• Design and evolve a typed IR for enterprise concepts including provenance and governance.
• Develop DSLs and compiler systems to turn enterprise data into executable capabilities.
• Build verification mechanisms to ensure semantic invariants during transformation.
• Create tooling for developers to inspect, validate and extend the enterprise model.
• Integrate neuro-symbolic AI with deterministic systems for safety and accuracy.
• Architect long-term semantic layer behind an AI-first platform.

Skills

DSL design

Compiler construction

Type systems

Formal verification

Knowledge representation

Programming languages

Distributed systems

AI integration

Domain modeling

Education

Bachelors in CS or related field

Job description

Senior / Distinguished Architect, Semantic Systems & Compilers

Remote (US)

About The Company

Our client is a fast-growing, AI-first enterprise software company. Its planning platform helps some of the world’s largest brands make faster, smarter decisions. It brings planning work that usually sits in separate silos onto one platform, which cuts waste and recovers value that large enterprises lose to inefficiency. The company is well funded, operates globally and has a strong record of growth.

The Role

The company is looking for an exceptional computer scientist to help build the semantic and computational foundation for the next generation of enterprise software. This is a deeply hands‑on, senior individual‑contributor role. You’ll work directly with the CTO and senior technical leaders on problems where several fields meet: domain‑specific languages (DSLs), programming languages, compilers, toolchains, type systems, formal specification and verification, databases, knowledge representation, distributed systems, developer platforms and artificial intelligence.

“Architect” is the company’s premier individual‑contributor technical track, and it carries no people‑management responsibility. The company wants someone who enjoys designing difficult abstractions, building compilers and developer tools, experimenting quickly and turning research‑level ideas into production software.

The Mission

Make sophisticated enterprise solutions much easier and faster to build. The way to do that is to give business meaning a precise, reusable representation that both people and AI can understand and that can be translated safely into executable software.

What You’ll Do

• Typed Enterprise Representation: Design and evolve a strongly typed, logical intermediate representation (IR) of enterprise concepts, relationships, state, time, units, constraints, plans, decisions, provenance and governance. Take on hard computer science problems where facts may be temporal, uncertain, conflicting, inferred or governed by authority.
• Semantic Compilation & DSL Design: Design domain‑specific languages and compiler systems that turn mixed enterprise information into governed semantic meaning, and that compile semantic definitions into executable platform capabilities. Work spans identity resolution, type inference, normalization, semantic validation, query and model compilation, lowering and provenance tracking.
• Formal Verification & Specification: Build specification, static analysis and verification mechanisms so that critical semantic invariants and constraints hold as representations are transformed, compiled and executed.
• Ontology & Semantic Authoring Systems: Build the tooling and developer experience that technical teams and domain experts use to inspect, extend, validate and reason about the enterprise model, combining formal rigor with excellent usability.
• Neuro‑Symbolic AI Integration: Build hybrid architectures in which neural AI handles ambiguity and generation (for example, document understanding, schema mapping and entity resolution), while typed, deterministic systems enforce semantic correctness, constraints, time, provenance and authority. AI generates candidates, and governed, deterministic systems verify them before they execute.
• Field Engineering Leverage: Create high‑leverage abstractions that help forward‑deployed engineering teams turn messy customer data and business requirements into a precise, executable solution with far less custom code and much more reuse.
• AI‑Native Software Engineering: Make heavy use of modern AI coding agents and developer environments to speed up codebase exploration, compiler prototyping, transformation building, testing and experimentation. Apply strong judgment to AI‑generated software so the underlying abstractions and type semantics stay correct.

What You’ll Bring

• Experience: 15+ years of deep software engineering experience, with a proven record of designing, building and scaling advanced enterprise software platforms.
• Education: A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics or a related quantitative field.
• Technical Depth: Deep experience in several of these areas: DSL design and implementation, programming language toolchains, compiler construction, intermediate representations and lowering, type systems, formal specification and verification, static analysis, database query compilation, schema systems, knowledge representation, graph and relational models, or temporal and provenance systems.
• Theoretical Foundations: A strong background in theoretical computer science and mathematics. Relevant depth may include type theory, formal semantics, logic, programming language theory, graph theory, algorithms, optimization or probabilistic reasoning.
• Domain Abstraction Ability: The ability to learn complex, unfamiliar business domains quickly and to separate reusable core semantics from incidental implementation details.
• Hands‑On Builder Mindset: A record of actually building systems, not only writing research papers or specifications. A PhD is valuable but not required; deep intellectual capability matters most.

Why This Role

• You’ll define the semantic layer behind an AI‑first platform that is used to automate millions of enterprise decisions.
• You’ll work directly with a CTO and leadership team who are deeply technical and still write code every day.
• You’ll have a rare chance to put programming‑language and compiler theory into production at enterprise scale.

Our client is an equal‑opportunity employer and welcomes applicants from all backgrounds.