Portfolio Architect

Cenovus Energy•Calgary, AB

About The Position

We are seeking a Platform/Portfolio Architect who thrives at the intersection of experimentation and strategy. You’ll be accelerating our AI enablement through hands-on exploration to validate architectural patterns, prove feasibility, and guide implementation teams. This role blends architectural leadership with technical acumen—you'll be as comfortable building proof-of-concepts as you are presenting a multi-year platform roadmap to executives. The role will appeal to technically curious architects who stay current through experimentation and prototyping, value shipping working solutions over lengthy documentation, and can translate between business outcomes and technical implementation. Rather than enforcing rigid frameworks, you'll enable teams through lightweight principles, working code, and collaborative problem-solving. You balance pragmatism with vision—enabling rapid iteration while maintaining architectural integrity across a complex digital ecosystem.

Requirements

Must be legally entitled to work in Canada.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
Minimum 12 years' experience, progressing from hands-on engineering to architecture or platform leadership.
Hands-on AI/ML platform experience: RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, embeddings/vector search, MLOps workflows (Azure ML, SageMaker, Databricks, or similar).
Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture (compute, networking, security, app hosting, monitoring) across AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Understanding of AI agent architecture, including agentic patterns, multi-agent orchestration, agent harness frameworks, tool integration, skills design, and memory management.
Experience with developer tooling ecosystem: CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitLab, Azure DevOps), infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation), observability tools (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana).
Experience reading and writing code in Python, TypeScript, or similar; git flow; prototyping with frameworks like FastAPI, React, or similar; understanding modern dev workflows.
Effective communicator who can translate complex concepts into clear solutions for both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Curious, hands-on, and pragmatic with experience in prototyping, influencing decisions through code/ADRs, working with LLM frameworks or platform engineering concepts, and continuously learning through experimentation.

Nice To Haves

We acknowledge the value of transferable skills and may consider equivalent combinations of experience and education should you not meet a specific requirement.

Responsibilities

Architect and prototype AI solutions and patterns for the cloud and EUC to demonstrate capability, validate costs, and establish patterns for enterprise adoption.
Design efficient, cost-optimized AI architectures that balance performance with sustainability—token optimization strategies, prompt caching patterns, knowledge stores, skill centralization.
Incorporate secure-by-design principles from inception.
Experiment with and evaluate emerging AI platform capabilities and cloud-native technologies to guide strategic adoption decisions and share learnings across the organization.
Partner with business and IT stakeholders to shape portfolio architecture that delivers measurable business value, reduces time to market, and aligns platform initiatives with enterprise strategy and long-term roadmaps—translating business requirements into technical solutions.
Co-create lightweight architecture principles and patterns with engineering teams—enabling autonomy while maintaining alignment, favoring ADRs (Architecture Decision Records) and working code over lengthy governance documents.
Develop outcome-driven roadmaps and capability maps using data and metrics; validate architectural decisions through rapid prototyping in production-like environments before scaling to implementation teams.
Provide technical leadership through code reviews, pair programming sessions, and architecture workshops—comfortable diving into APIs, infrastructure-as-code, container orchestration, and integration patterns when needed.