Principal Architect

What you will do...

• Serve as Zencore’s senior-most technical authority on the practical application of advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• Partner with the sales and business development teams in a pre-sales capacity to scope opportunities, design solutions for proposals, and act as the senior technical voice in client pitches.
• Lead the architecture and design of sophisticated, secure, and scalable AI solutions for our clients, moving beyond standard API integrations to create genuine competitive advantages.
• Collaborate closely with Cloud & Data Architects to guarantee the design and deployment of comprehensive client solutions.
• Address the growing European demand for private, data-sovereign AI by designing systems that meet strict GDPR and data privacy requirements. Strive for model explainability and bias mitigation, ensuring solutions adhere to ethical standards and European safety guardrails.
• Architect solutions for hosting, fine-tuning, and optimizing both proprietary (e.g., Gemini, Claude) and open-source (e.g., Llama, Mistral) models on hyperscaler platforms.
• Lead clients in selecting optimal cloud-native technologies, prioritizing Google Cloud solutions for deploying and scaling production-grade agentic systems.
• Guide and mentor customers and Zencore's engineering teams on advanced topics, establishing best practices for high-performance training (PyTorch, JAX, TPUs), efficient model serving (vLLM), and complex agentic systems (LangGraph, Langchain, Google ADK).
• Devise the financial architecture of AI solutions by performing ROI analysis and implementing cost-optimization strategies to ensure large-scale deployments remain economically sustainable for customers.
• Act as an external thought leader, contributing to the Zencore brand through blog posts, conference presentations, and community engagement.
• Act as a "player-coach," providing hands-on leadership and fostering a culture of deep technical excellence in AI/ML.

Who we need...

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, natural sciences, mathematics, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience in designing and delivering high-scale AI/ML systems.
• Extensive experience in a senior or principal architect role with a proven track record of designing and delivering complex, production-grade machine learning systems that have created measurable business value.
• Deep, hands-on architectural experience with at least one major cloud platform (GCP, AWS, or Azure) is required.
• Direct, hands-on experience with Google Cloud (Vertex AI, GKE, TPUs) is a significant plus.
• Proven expertise in LLM optimization, including techniques for quantization, pruning, efficient fine-tuning (e.g., LoRA), and high-performance serving (e.g., vLLM, TensorRT-LLM).
• Hands-on experience with high-performance ML frameworks (e.g., JAX, PyTorch/XLA) for training or fine-tuning large-scale models.
• Expertise in designing and deploying agentic workflows using both code-centric (e.g., LangGraph, LangChain, Google ADK) and low-code (e.g., Vertex AI Agent Builder, LangSmith Agent Builder) paradigms.
• A strong understanding of the architectural patterns required for building secure, private, and data-sovereign AI solutions.
• Experience with LLM observability and evaluation frameworks (e.g., LangSmith, LangFuse, Vertex AI Evaluation).
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to articulate complex technical concepts and their business value to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• A passion for mentoring and a drive for continuous learning in the fast-evolving AI landscape.