AI Architect

Kroger • Blue Ash, OH

5h

About The Position

This role in going to work in AI Enablement team focusing on architecture, solutions design for AI use cases. Define and maintain the enterprise reference architecture for agentic platforms (agentic framework, tools, MCP, registries, evals, orchestration, grounding, observability). Establish architectural standards and best practices for agent design, tool integration, safety, telemetry, versioning, and lifecycle management. Provide architectural leadership for agentic platform engineering teams, ensuring scalability, resiliency, performance, and operability. Design, develop and guide integration with semantic layers, embeddings, vector search, knowledge models, and enterprise data products to enable grounded agent behavior. Drive architectural direction and hands on implementation for low-code/no-code agent-building platforms, ensuring governance, consistency, and ease of adoption. Partner with cloud, security, product, and enterprise architecture teams to align agentic platform designs with Kroger’s AI governance and RAI principles. Define and support agentic SDLC through patterns for evals, safety tests, regression gates, monitoring, and benchmarking. Evaluate new agentic frameworks, open-source standards, and orchestration tools to guide build vs buy platform decisions. Partner closely with development, senior product management, architecture, information security & infrastructure teams within a large organization to deliver software & technology products that meet functional & non-functional requirements & produce desired business outcomes. Curate & adhere to architectural principles & associated processes for adopting new technology or integrating with a new third-party solution. Advise senior product management on technology specific aspects of product strategy development & adopt emerging technology appropriate to stated goals. Mentors junior solutions architecture staff on architectural principles & methods. Demonstrate the company's core values of respect, honesty, integrity, diversity, inclusion and safety.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree Computer science or another related technical field
• Any expertise/experience in business case development, product scoping & project planning with development teams
• Any strong performance management experience of large work groups
• Any delivered innovative results in previous roles demonstrating strong knowledge of industry trends & industry competition
• Any experience integrating open source technologies in high volume production environments with strong knowledge of agile methodology
• 7+ years experience taking a lead role in the successful delivery of complex software & automation systems
• 12+ years experience in software/infrastructure development domain with emphasis on utilizing design patterns & architectural principles to ensure timely delivery of quality solutions
• 10+ years’ experience in cloud and distributed systems architecture focused on scalability, reliability, observability, and performance.
• 7+ years designing enterprise AI/ML systems; 1+ years hands-on with GenAI, agentic workflows, RAG, LLM-based integrations, or multi-agent systems.
• Strong expertise with agentic frameworks and tooling (MCP, LangChain, LangGraph,LlamaIndex, autogen, crewai, Agent sdk,OpenAI SDK etc).
• Proven experience integrating APIs and enterprise systems into agentic platforms and workflows.
• Ability to rapidly build AI-driven prototypes, proofs of concept, and demo-ready product experiences.
• Experience defining and governing enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and reference architectures.
• Deep understanding of MCP servers, tool calling, registries, eval pipelines, agent observability, and multi-agent orchestration.
• Hands-on experience with Azure and GCP, including Kubernetes, containerization, identity, networking, CI/CD, and API platforms

Nice To Haves

• Master's Degree Computer science, information systems, or related technical field
• Any experience developing/architecting public cloud-hosted backend services with Azure/GCP
• 5+ years experience in designing eCommerce applications & working on high volume internet scale solutions
• Any experience developing React, Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android)
• Any experience developing/designing a scalable microservices architecture in Go, Java and Node.js

Responsibilities

• Develop the overall software & deployment architecture of application solutions across several teams within a large organization
• Partner with 3rd party vendors to integrate capabilities as required by the solution under development
• Present opportunities with cost/benefit analysis to leadership in order to shape sound architectural decisions
• Lead the discovery phase of large projects to develop high level architecture & design
• Draft, review & maintain architectural diagrams, interface specifications & other architectural artifacts as required by the delivery teams to clearly communicate the needs of the solution under development
• Interact with & present to senior engineering & product management with the presence to influence & drive the decision makers to a solution
• Identify key technology overlaps & gaps; formulate strategies to optimize technology spend
• Provide technical leadership to ensure clarity between ongoing projects & the strategic objectives of the company
• Assess emerging technologies & make appropriate recommendations based on business needs
• Mentor team members & Solutions Architects in software development principles, patterns, processes & practices
• Promote the capture & reuse of intellectual capital, including code objects & components
• Must be able to perform the essential job functions of this position with or without reasonable accommodation

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees