Practice Architect II-AI/ML - REMOTE

TEKsystems•Alexandria, VA

3d•$156,000 - $234,000•Remote

About The Position

The Practice Architect II (AI/ML) is a senior hands-on architect responsible for technical direction and delivery execution on customer engagements building AI-powered applications and digital platforms. The role sets architecture direction and engineering standards, writes and reviews production code, and leads onshore and offshore engineering teams from design through production. It is a delivery role rather than a pre-sales role, and the architect is accountable for the output of the teams they lead. The architect owns architecture for agentic AI and full-stack solutions, translates requirements into scalable architectures, sets standards and patterns, and makes final technical trade-off decisions. The position includes production coding, building reusable accelerators and reference architectures, evaluating technologies, and unblocking engineering teams. It also provides technical leadership across concurrent customer engagements, mentors engineers, communicates with customer technical and executive stakeholders, and identifies risks and dependencies. The role requires expertise in agentic AI, enterprise data onboarding and governed knowledge layers, retrieval and RAG, agent security and execution, evaluation, cloud-agnostic delivery, and modern application architecture. The position is permanent and fully remote, based out of Alexandria, Virginia.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
10 or more years in software engineering and architecture, including 3 or more years as a lead or principal architect.
2 or more years building production AI or agentic systems that are deployed and operating, rather than pilots or proofs of concept.
Experience onboarding enterprise data and building a governed knowledge or semantic layer, including entitlement and lineage.
Ability to describe the security and identity model for agents acting on enterprise data.
Currently coding and able to complete a hands-on technical assessment.
Experience leading offshore or distributed engineering teams.
Experience defining RACI across customer, onshore, and offshore teams on a live engagement.
Production delivery on at least two of AWS, Azure, or GCP, with cloud-agnostic delivery capability.
Customer-facing experience with engineering leadership and executive-level stakeholders.
Expertise in agentic AI, AI-powered solution design, and modern application architecture.
Solution architecture and system design experience.
Hands-on software development and prototyping skills.
Experience with AI-assisted coding at scale for production deployment.
Experience with code reviews, engineering standards, and quality governance.
Knowledge of enterprise data source access, ownership, entitlement, classification, and quality gating.
Knowledge of governed, queryable enterprise knowledge layers, semantic modeling, entity resolution, lineage, and freshness.
Experience with RAG and retrieval architecture, including vector and hybrid search, embedding pipelines, retrieval quality tuning, and context and memory management.
Knowledge of agent security, including agent identity, least-privilege tool access, data-boundary enforcement, and audit.
Knowledge of agent execution harnesses, including tool and component boundaries, orchestration, failure handling, and human-in-the-loop processes.
Experience with evaluation harnesses, regression suites, groundedness and retrieval-quality metrics, and cost and latency instrumentation.
Technical skills with Python, TypeScript/Node, strong SQL, agent frameworks such as LangGraph or LlamaIndex (or equivalent), MCP, containers, CI/CD, and IaC.

Responsibilities

Own architecture direction for agentic AI and full-stack solutions across assigned engagements.
Translate business and technical requirements into scalable, sustainable solution architectures.
Set architecture standards and design patterns for delivery teams.
Own code-review and architecture-review gates and make final calls on technical trade-offs.
Write production code for customer engagements, approximately 40–60% of the time.
Build and own reusable accelerators, frameworks, and reference architectures for use across engagements.
Evaluate emerging technologies and architecture patterns and decide what enters the technology stack.
Unblock engineering teams on implementation problems.
Provide technical direction to engineering pods across concurrent engagements.
Lead offshore technical leads and ensure design intent is maintained in distributed-team handoffs.
Mentor engineers on architecture, code quality, and modern engineering practices.
Serve as the senior technical voice to customer architects, engineering leaders, and executives.
Explain architecture decisions, risks, and trade-offs to technical and non-technical audiences.
Surface technical risks and dependencies early and provide mitigation options.
Drive alignment across customer product, engineering, and business stakeholders.
Deliver working production systems from enterprise data onboarding through operation.
Define RACI across customer, onshore, and offshore teams on live engagements.
Build collaboration across global and offshore teams and leave implementations customers can extend.

Benefits

Medical insurance
Dental insurance
Vision insurance
Critical illness, accident, and hospital coverage
401(k) retirement plan with pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions
Life insurance, including voluntary life and AD&D coverage for employees and dependents
Short- and long-term disability
Health Savings Account (HSA)
Transportation benefits
Employee Assistance Program
Paid time off, vacation, or sick leave
Potential additional earnings through annual bonuses or profit sharing