Technical Lead/Architect - AI Platforms

TEKsystems; United States; Remote; USD 138,000 - 165,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental & vision

401(k) Retirement Plan

Life Insurance

Paid time off

Job summary

TEKsystems is seeking an experienced, hands-on director-level engineering leader to own the architecture, engineering, and reliability of the enterprise AI Platform. You will partner with AI Product Managers and security teams, starting as a player-coach to grow a large platform team.

You will define reference architecture for the AI control plane, build a multi-provider gateway, and deliver runtimes for GenAI model serving, memory stores, and tool interoperability.

Qualifications

• Experience building enterprise GenAI or agent platforms.
• Experience in regulated environments (health tech, HIPAA, validation, auditability).
• Experience implementing security, privacy, and FinOps controls for shared AI infra.
• Experience with MCP, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes and cloud-native platform practices.

Responsibilities

• Define and evolve reference architecture for AI control plane and paved-road services.
• Design and build a multi-provider model gateway with routing, quota, isolation, and cost accounting.
• Deliver a GenAI runtime for model serving, retrieval-augmented generation, and tool interoperability.
• Own design of registries with versioning, lineage, gates, and auditability.
• Build observability and tracing for prompts, model calls, and agent steps.

Skills

Architecture

Solution architecture

Design

Agile

artificial intelligence

Tools

Kubernetes

OpenTelemetry

MCP

Job description

Description

A hands-on technical leadership role accountable for the architecture, engineering, and reliability of the enterprise AI Platform: the control plane and paved road that let teams build, deploy, and operate enterprise GenAI and agentic systems safely and quickly. This role is the technical counterpart to the Product Manager, AI Platform and partners with AI Product Managers, AI/Agentic Engineering, Applied Data Science, security, and division engineering teams. The role is Director-mapped and begins as a player-coach, with responsibility to grow and lead a platform engineering team.

What You'll Do

Define and evolve the reference architecture for the AI control plane, paved-road services, SDKs, templates, and developer experience.

Design and build a model gateway that supports multi-provider routing, failover, quota and rate limiting, tenant isolation, key management, token accounting, and cost allocation (e.g., a LiteLLM-style gateway over Azure OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, or Vertex AI).

Deliver a GenAI runtime for model serving, retrieval-augmented generation, context and memory stores, vector and hybrid search, sandboxed tool or code execution, secrets brokering, and MCP-style tool interoperability.

Own the technical design of model, agent, prompt, and tool registries, including versioning, lineage, approval and promotion gates, deprecation, and auditability.

Build platform observability and traceability for prompts, model calls, tool calls, and agent steps using distributed tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions and Langfuse- or Arize-class tooling), with evaluation, quality, drift, latency, and cost signals.

Implement security, guardrails, and responsible-AI controls in the platform, including PII/PHI handling, prompt-injection defenses, identity-on-behalf-of, least-privilege tool access, and policy enforcement.

Establish platform engineering practices using Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, secure software development, capacity management, and reliability engineering. Define SLOs, participate in on-call, and lead incident response.

Write and review production code, conduct architecture reviews, set engineering standards, and make pragmatic build-versus-buy and vendor recommendations with budget input.

Hire, coach, and develop a platform engineering team of approximately 38 engineers; allocate work, set goals, and manage career development while remaining technically hands-on.

Partner with the Product Manager, AI Platform to sequence the platform roadmap, communicate tradeoffs, and measure adoption, reliability, time-to-onboard, and consumer-team outcomes.

Skills

Architecture, Solution architecture, Design, Agile, artificial intelligence

Top Skills Details

Architecture,Solution architecture,Design,Agile,artificial intelligence

Additional Skills & Qualifications

Experience building enterprise GenAI or agent platforms using capabilities such as multi-model routing, agent registries, prompt management, evaluation harnesses, and GenAI tracing.

Experience in a highly regulated environment such as health tech, med-tech, or life sciences, with GxP, HIPAA, validation, auditability, and change-control constraints.

Experience implementing security, responsible-AI, privacy, policy, and cost or FinOps controls for shared AI infrastructure.

Experience with open standards and tooling such as MCP, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and cloud-native platform engineering practices.

Experience Level

Expert Level

Job Type & Location

This is a Contract position based out of North Chicago, IL.

Pay and Benefits

The pay range for this position is $100.00 - $120.00/hr.

Individual compensation offered for this position within this range will depend on many factors, including qualifications, skills, relevant experience, job knowledge, geographic location, internal equity, and other pertinent job-related factors.

Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your jobclassification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may besubject to specific elections, plan, or program terms. If eligible, the benefitsavailable for this temporary role may include the following:Medical, dental & visionCritical Illness, Accident, and Hospital401(k) Retirement Plan Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions availableLife Insurance (Voluntary Life & AD&D for the employee and dependents)Short and long-term disabilityHealth Spending Account (HSA)Transportation benefitsEmployee Assistance ProgramTime Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave)

Workplace Type

This is a fully remote position.

Application Deadline

This position is anticipated to close on Oct 15, 2026.

San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, for all positions located in the city and county of San Francisco, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

Massachusetts Lie Detector: It is unlawful in Massachusetts to require or administer a lie detector test as a condition of employment or continued employment. An employer who violates this law shall be subject to criminal penalties and civil liability.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI): We may use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to support parts of our hiring process, including sourcing, screening, and evaluating candidates. AI helps assess applications and qualifications, but final decisions are made by our hiring team. By applying, you acknowledge and agree that your application may be reviewed using AI tools.