Architect, Delivery Operations & AI Systems

AbbVie•North Chicago, IL

4h•$109,500 - $208,500

About The Position

This role will serve as the lead Architect for Delivery Operations, designing and governing enterprise-grade platforms, workflows, and integration patterns that enable scalable, secure, and reliable delivery of software, data, and AI-enabled solutions across R&D and Safety. This role is responsible for defining architectural strategy, guiding implementation teams, and ensuring that agentic, cloud, and enterprise application capabilities are translated into business value while meeting operational, compliance, and security standards. The Architect will act as a senior technical leader across product, engineering, operations, and data disciplines to modernize delivery capabilities, improve resilience, and establish scalable patterns for AI-enabled systems and traditional application ecosystems.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, Biomedical Engineering, or related field plus 7 years' experience; OR Master’s degree plus 6 years' experience; OR PhD with 2 years’ experience
Respective years of experience in software engineering, enterprise architecture, solution architecture, or application/platform delivery roles.
Experience with AI/LLM-enabled systems, agent orchestration patterns, RAG frameworks, or secure enterprise AI architecture.
Demonstrated experience designing and implementing large-scale enterprise application architectures.
Strong experience with cloud-native architecture, APIs, distributed systems, event-driven design, and modern software delivery practices.
Strong understanding of software development lifecycle (traditional and Agile methods), operational support models, and platform reliability principles.
Experience working in regulated environments and applying security, compliance, and data governance requirements in architecture decisions.
Proven ability to evaluate emerging technologies and turn them into practical, scalable business solutions.
Excellent written, verbal, and stakeholder communication skills.

Nice To Haves

Pharmaceutical, life sciences, R&D, or Safety domain experience.
Deep knowledge of DevSecOps practices and CI/CD pipeline design, with hands-on experience in Azure-based development and deployment environments.
Familiarity with modern enterprise technology platforms and tools, including Claude, Jira, Confluent, Docker, Git, JFrog, Tricentis (qTest/Tosca), ServiceNow, and Azure DevOps (ADO).
Understanding of agentic development methodologies, including BMAD, with the ability to apply these approaches to scalable architecture and solution delivery.

Responsibilities

Architect enterprise delivery solutions for complex business and scientific workflows, including software platforms, automation pipelines, integrations, and AI-enabled operational capabilities.
Define end-to-end architecture patterns for agentic and traditional systems, including orchestration, tool integration, event-driven services, APIs, cloud-native components, and enterprise data connectivity.
Lead design of LLM- and agent-based capabilities, including prompting/orchestration strategies, memory and context handling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), understanding of Model Context Protocol (MCP) structures and human-in-the-loop decision pathways.
Establish architecture guardrails for safety, security, compliance, observability, reliability, and cost management across AI and application delivery platforms.
Provide senior technical consultation to Delivery Operations leadership, product teams, software engineers, and business stakeholders on architecture decisions, technology selection, and implementation tradeoffs.
Design for operational resilience, including monitoring, telemetry, fallback mechanisms, access control, prompt injection protection, and service recovery patterns.
Drive cloud, DevOps, and MLOps architecture standards, including CI/CD pipelines, containerization, serverless workloads, message-based processing, and scalable runtime environments.
Evaluate emerging technologies and translate them into pragmatic, business-relevant architecture recommendations that improve productivity, delivery speed, quality, and risk management.
Lead cross-functional architecture alignment across product management, software engineering, data science, platform teams, and support organizations to ensure cohesive technical direction.
Mentor engineers and technical leads by promoting architecture best practices, reviewing designs, and helping teams solve highly complex implementation and operational challenges.