Principal Architect

What’s the Opportunity? 

The Principal Architect is a senior technical leadership role responsible for defining and maintaining the architectural standards, integration patterns, and technical governance for AI Operating System (AIOS), the AI-native platform, across all client engagements. Your primary goal is to ensure that all squad-level architecture decisions align with enterprise standards, that the platform remains scalable and maintainable at scale, and that reusable capabilities are properly designed and shared across the organization.

This position serves as the leading technical authority across the client AI transformations, providing architectural leadership to engagements. It establishes long-term technical direction, influences, enterprise technology decisions, and ensures AIOS implementations remain scalable, secure, and aligned with both client enterprise architecture and Zafin’s.

This means the position will be responsible for defining platform-wide architectural standards for agent design, orchestration, retrieval, memory, prompt engineering, evaluation, observability, integration, security, and responsible AI implementation; reviewing and approving complex architectural decisions from squad architects; and leading the evolution of our reusable architecture library. You work horizontally across all squads without direct reporting authority, serving as the escalation point for architecture decisions platform-wide.

As a senior technical architect, this position will mentor junior architects and senior engineers on design approaches, ensure consistency across implementations, and balance the need for platform standardization with the practical realities of individual client engagements. The work directly enables faster delivery, higher quality, and greater reuse across all client-facing teams.

What Will You Do? 

• Define target-state enterprise architecture for complex AIOS transformations, ensuring alignment between client business strategy, technology landscape, and AI operating model.
• Define and maintain platform-wide architecture standards for agent design, orchestration, integration patterns, and API design
• Review and approve squad-level architecture decisions for alignment with enterprise standards and best practices
• Lead the development, governance, and adoption of reusable reference architectures, implementation patterns, and technical capabilities across client engagements.
• Partner with Agent Architects and Senior Agent Engineers across client-facing squads to align on design standards and drive adoption of platform patterns
• Serve as the senior technical advisor to CIOS, Chief Architects, and enterprise technology leaders during client engagements including conducting complex architecture reviews and novel implementations; translate technical standards into client context, and more.
• Identify architectural patterns emerging in client engagements and translate into reusable reference architectures, and implementation guidance where applicable
• Develop and maintain security and data governance patterns for AI systems; ensure compliance with regulatory and risk requirements
• Mentor and coach junior architects and senior engineers on architecture approaches, design trade-offs, and platform standards
• Identify and address architecture technical debt; propose recommendations that improve scalability, maintainability, and reusability
• Serve as escalation point for architecture decisions that span multiple squads or have platform-wide implications
• Communicate architecture vision, standards, and decisions to executive and technical stakeholders quarterly or as needed

What Do You Need to Succeed? 

Must Haves 

• 15+ years of experience in enterprise technology delivery, including senior leadership or executive client-facing roles.
• Experience designing enterprise-scale AI platforms incorporating agentic AI, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), orchestration frameworks, API ecosystems, and cloud-native architectures.
• Experience providing technical leadership across multiple enterprise transformations simultaneously.
• Deep expertise in agent orchestration frameworks, integration architecture, API design, and enterprise software architecture patterns 
• Demonstrated experience defining and scaling reusable technical standards across multiple teams or at an enterprise scale 
• Strong grounding in security and data governance patterns for AI/ML systems in regulated environments 
• Ability to influence enterprise architecture decisions at CIO, Chief Architect, and executive technology leadership. This includes technical decisions and drive adoption without direct reporting authority over the engineers implementing the standards. 
• Experience establishing reference architectures, technical standards, and governance models adopted across multiple delivery organizations.
• Excellent communicator who can translate architecture standards and technical concepts into practical guidance for engineers at different levels 

Nice to Have 

• Prior experience as a Principal Architect, Chief Architect, at a software/SaaS or AI company 
• Experience with Azure AI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Open AI, Anthropic or comparable enterprise AI ecosystems.
• Track record of building reusable component libraries or platforms that drove measurable adoption and reduced duplicate engineering effort 
• Experience with enterprise architecture governance frameworks 
• Background in financial services technology or regulated industries 
• Experience designing and implementing observability, monitoring, and governance systems for AI/ML platforms
• Published papers, speaking engagements, or open-source contributions demonstrating thought leadership in architecture 

Additional Job Details 

• Vacancy Status: Open position(s) to be filled
• Mode of Work: Hybrid
• Use of AI: Zafin may use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and/or other forms of automated technology to screen and/or assess applicants for this position. Zafin will not utilize AI for conducting interviews and/or making hiring decisions.