Staff AI Platform Architect | Enterprise LLM & Governance

Remote; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Engineer in AI Engineering to translate the enterprise AI roadmap into scalable platform architecture and reusable services. This senior individual contributor role partners across Engineering, IT, Security, Legal, Data, and business units to set standards and deliver secure, measurable AI adoption.

You will lead architecture reviews, design reference implementations, and mentor engineers while advancing enterprise AI governance, observability, and cost attribution

Qualifications

• Progressive experience in enterprise software engineering.
• Deep hands-on understanding of generative AI, large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic AI patterns, prompt orchestration, and production AI system design.
• Experience designing shared platform services, reusable component libraries, APIs, integration frameworks, or developer enablement platforms used by multiple teams.
• Strong architecture judgment across security, reliability, scalability, observability, maintainability, and operational cost tradeoffs.
• Experience implementing or contributing to AI governance controls such as access management, data classification, audit logging, model lifecycle management, and compliance-aware development practices.
• Ability to influence technical direction across matrixed teams through architecture reviews, written guidance, reference implementations, and hands-on collaboration.
• Experience defining metrics, telemetry, or attribution mechanisms for adoption, productivity, cost, quality, or operational performance.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to explain complex AI engineering concepts to technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve enterprise AI architecture patterns for LLM integration, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic workflows, prompt orchestration, and workflow automation.
• Create reference architectures, design reviews, decision records, and implementation guidance that enable consistent AI development across business units.
• Serve as a technical authority for AI platform decisions, including model selection, integration approaches, data boundary enforcement, and lifecycle management.
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and recommend fit-for-purpose adoption paths aligned to security, operational, and enterprise architecture requirements.
• Partner with product, platform, and business technology teams to identify common needs and convert them into reusable engineering patterns.

Skills

Architecture judgment

Technical leadership

Communication skills

Mentoring engineers

Cross-team collaboration

Education

Advanced degree

Tools

Databricks

Snowflake

Vector databases

RAG platforms

Job description

Shield AI is seeking a Staff Engineer in AI Engineering to translate the enterprise AI roadmap into scalable platform architecture and reusable services. This senior individual contributor role partners across Engineering, IT, Security, Legal, Data, and business units to set standards and deliver secure, measurable AI adoption.

You will lead architecture reviews, design reference implementations, and mentor engineers while advancing enterprise AI governance, observability, and cost attribution