Strategic Data & AI Enterprise Architect

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

Job summary

Blackbaud seeks an experienced Enterprise Architect for Data & AI to shape the enterprise data and AI architecture that powers a scalable SaaS platform. You will bridge business strategy with data platforms, analytics, and AI/ML to enable trusted analytics and responsible AI adoption.

You will collaborate with product, engineering, security, compliance, and business leaders to translate vision into durable competitive advantage, driving strategic platform decisions, governance, and scalable

Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience with 10+ years in enterprise, solution, or platform architecture.
• Proven experience designing enterprise-scale data platforms in cloud-based SaaS environments.
• Strong expertise in AI-enabled system architecture and ML/Gen AI patterns.
• Solid understanding of AI/ML architectures, data pipelines and model lifecycles.
• Hands-on familiarity with modern data technologies (cloud data warehouses, data lakes, streaming).

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the enterprise data and AI architecture vision, principles, and roadmap aligned with business strategy and SaaS growth objectives.
• Establish data-as-a-product practices including ownership models, quality standards, SLAs, discoverability, lifecycle management.
• Guide strategic platform decisions across data ingestion, storage, analytics, ML, and AI enablement.
• Partner with product and engineering teams to embed AI/ML capabilities into SaaS products and internal workflows.
• Define AI architecture patterns (feature stores, lifecycles, vector databases, LLM integration).
• Establish governance and guardrails for responsible AI, including security, privacy, explainability, and regulatory compliance.
• Collaborate with Security and Legal to align AI/data architectures with evolving regulations.
• Create and enforce enterprise standards and reference architectures for data platforms and AI services.
• Mentor architects and senior engineers on data and AI architecture patterns.
• Translate business objectives into data and AI capabilities that drive measurable outcomes.
• Guide cloud-native data/AI architectures across SaaS stacks and multi-tenant environments.
• Balance innovation with long-term architectural sustainability.
• Evangelize data and AI best practices across the organization.

Skills

Enterprise data architecture

AI architecture

Cloud-native SaaS

Data governance

Executive communication

Platform governance

TOGAF

Agile/Lean delivery

Cross-functional collaboration

Model lifecycle management

Vector databases

Tools

Cloud data warehouses

Data lakes

Streaming platforms

Vector databases

LLM integration

Job description

Blackbaud seeks an experienced Enterprise Architect for Data & AI to shape the enterprise data and AI architecture that powers a scalable SaaS platform. You will bridge business strategy with data platforms, analytics, and AI/ML to enable trusted analytics and responsible AI adoption.

You will collaborate with product, engineering, security, compliance, and business leaders to translate vision into durable competitive advantage, driving strategic platform decisions, governance, and scalable