Principal AI Architect / Enterprise AI Platform Architect

Overview

Item.com is seeking a hands-on principal architect to define and evolve the enterprise AI platform that product and engineering teams build on. This role establishes the architecture, standards, governance, and operating model for secure, scalable AI capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Create a durable enterprise AI platform strategy and reference architecture.
• Enable multiple teams to build and operate AI capabilities safely and consistently.
• Balance innovation with security, governance, reliability, cost control, and long-term maintainability.
• Define target architecture for model access, data boundaries, retrieval, tools, agent execution, evaluation, observability, identity, and auditability.
• Establish reusable platform capabilities, technical standards, reference implementations, and adoption roadmaps.
  
  

Minimum Requirements:

• Proven hands-on architecture ownership for enterprise-scale platforms, AI/ML systems, distributed systems, or a combination of these.
• Experience designing secure multi-team/multi-tenant platforms with operational governance and adoption models.
• Demonstrated judgment on model/vendor selection, data controls, security, evaluation, observability, cost, and reliability.
• Ability to communicate architecture and tradeoffs to engineers, executives, and operational leaders.
• Principal-level scope must be evidenced by platforms or standards others adopted—not title alone.
  
  

Preferred Requirements:

• Lead architecture decisions across multi-tenancy, security, privacy, governance, vendor/model strategy, resilience, and cost management.
• Partner with security, data, platform, product, and executive stakeholders on AI risk and investment decisions.
• Guide high-impact system designs and resolve cross-team architectural tradeoffs.
• Remain technically engaged through design review, prototype/reference implementation, and production architecture oversight.