Senior AI/ML Architect

Posted 2hrs ago

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Job Description

Senior AI/ML Architect role in a contract position designing edge AI assistant systems. Leading architecture discovery and technology assessments for AI systems at Data Ideology.

Responsibilities:

  • Lead SLM candidate evaluation and selection: assess Small Language Model options for edge deployment against hardware constraints, inference latency requirements, domain restriction feasibility, and licensing.
  • Produce a technology assessment with explicit trade-off rationale and a recommended approach.
  • Design the domain restriction and guardrails architecture: define how the SLM is constrained to a known operational scope, how out-of-domain responses are prevented, and how the system enforces retrieval-first, non-authoritative behavior appropriate for a safety-adjacent environment.
  • Design the capability framework that structures how the system responds to operator queries — how capabilities are scoped and isolated, how the framework supports incremental addition of new interaction types over time, and what the prototype will implement.
  • Design the retrieval-augmented inference pipeline: define how the SLM retrieves context from a local knowledge store at inference time, including retrieval strategy, context injection approach, and latency budget appropriate for the edge environment.
  • Evaluate candidate cloud services for knowledge retrieval, model governance, and fleet-level model lifecycle management including over-the-air model distribution to edge devices.
  • Produce architecture recommendations aligned to client enterprise standards; all service selections are subject to client review and approval.
  • Define the offboard ML lifecycle: how models are evaluated, adapted through prompting and retrieval augmentation, versioned, governed, and distributed at scale.
  • Fine-tuning or custom model training is not a default commitment in this phase — adaptation approach will be determined based on discovery findings.
  • Collaborate with the Edge ML / Embedded Engineer on hardware constraint inputs that shape SLM selection and inference pipeline design, ensuring architecture recommendations are grounded in confirmed runtime feasibility.
  • Collaborate with the AWS Solutions Architect on candidate cloud service architecture for model governance, knowledge retrieval, and the model update pipeline, ensuring the cloud-side AI architecture aligns with the broader platform.
  • Document safety design principles and operational boundaries — authority separation, bounded AI behavior, explainability approach, and human-in-the-loop considerations — as architecture artifacts for client engineering and compliance review.
  • Produce all architecture recommendations as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) with explicit trade-off rationale.
  • Clearly distinguish confirmed decisions from those that remain conditional on hardware specifications or interface access not yet confirmed.

Requirements:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent professional experience;
  • AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Pro or Security Specialty) are highly preferred.
  • 7+ years of experience in Cloud Infrastructure or Platform Engineering, with a proven track record of leading multi-tenant AWS data platforms and event-driven architectures.
  • Expert-level hands-on proficiency with AWS core services (S3, Glue, Redshift, Lake Formation, IoT Core, KMS) and authoring complex Terraform modules with remote state management.
  • Deep experience building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure, including environment promotion (Dev/Stage/Prod), drift detection, and automated validation.
  • Solid networking fundamentals, including VPC design, PrivateLink, and identity federation patterns (SAML/OAuth2/mTLS).
  • Demonstrated ability to design airtight data isolation at scale (ABAC/RBAC) and produce builder-ready technical standards such as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
  • Strong financial acumen with the ability to track AWS spend against cost models and drive optimization through resource tagging and architectural efficiency.

Benefits:

  • Remote work from home.
  • Specific business hours will depend on client needs.