Role Overview
We are seeking a strategic AI Architect to lead the design, governance, and implementation of our enterprise-wide AI architecture. This role defines and drives the endtoend architecture for AI and ML solutions, ensuring they are scalable, secure, and aligned with our retail and customerexperience strategies. You'll serve as the bridge between business strategy and technical execution, translating complex AI opportunities into actionable architectural blueprints that drive measurable business value. This is a handson technical leadership role: you will both design architectures and dive into code, data, and systems, partnering with geographically distributed teams to turn ideas into production ready AI products.
Key Responsibilities
AI Architecture & Strategy
- Define and own the enterprise AI architecture for retail use cases, aligning with business priorities and technology strategy.
- Develop reference architectures, patterns, and standards for AI/ML and Generative AI solutions.
- Translate retail business problems into scalable AI solution blueprints with clear data, model, and integration designs.
- Partner with business and product leaders to identify and prioritize high-impact AI opportunities across merchandising, supply chain, marketing, stores, and e-commerce.
AI Solutioning & Design
- Architect end-to-end AI solutions, including data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, inference, and system integration.
- Design AI systems for core retail domains such as:
- Search, recommendations, and personalization
- Demand forecasting, inventory optimization, replenishment, and allocation
- Pricing and markdown optimization
- AI assistants and copilots for store, merchandising, and supply-chain teams
- Define integration patterns between AI services and retail platforms (POS, OMS, WMS, CRM, e-commerce).
- Lead architectural reviews, ensuring solutions meet performance, scalability, security, cost, and reliability requirements.
MLOps, GenAI & Governance
- Establish MLOps and AIOps practices, including CI/CD for models, automated retraining, monitoring, drift detection, and cost controls.
- Define standards for Generative AI and LLM usage, including:
- Multi RAG architectures, MCP and vector search
- Prompt orchestration and tool-calling
- Safety, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop workflows
- Ensure AI solutions comply with data privacy, security, and responsible AI principles.
- Partner with Security, Legal, and Enterprise Architecture to align AI solutions with governance and risk standards.
Technology Evaluation, Implementation & Delivery Leadership
- Work closely with AI Engineers, ML Engineers, Data Engineers, and platform teams to ensure architectures are production-ready and executable.
- Provide hands-on guidance during implementation, including reference code, pipelines, schemas, and infrastructure patterns.
- Evaluate and recommend AI SAAS solutions, cloud services, and frameworks (AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, etc.).
- Lead build vs. buy decisions and support vendor selection for AI capabilities.
Required Qualifications
- 9+ years of experience in software, data, or AI engineering, with 5+ years in AI/ML architecture roles.
- Proven experience designing and delivering production AI solutions in retail, e-commerce, supply chain, or adjacent domains.
- Strong hands-on expertise in:
- Python and ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn)
- Modern data architectures (lakehouse, streaming, batch pipelines)
- Modern Data Platforms (Databricks, Snowflake)
- Cloud platforms and managed AI/ML services
- MLOps practices (model lifecycle, monitoring, CI/CD)
- Solid understanding of LLMs, Generative AI patterns, and AI system integration.
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex architectures to both technical and business stakeholders.
Preferred Qualifications
- Deep experience in retail or consumer-facing industries (merchandising, stores, supply chain, digital commerce).
Experience building or scaling enterprise AI platforms or AI Centers of Excellence.
