Principal AI Architect, CTO
About The Position
You’re joining a strategic initiative to help a major media and technology company build a new behavioral intelligence platform from the ground up. This is an embedded consulting role, not a traditional engagement. You’ll be shaping the technical foundation of a commercial unit that leverages large-scale behavioral data through AI and advanced data architecture. Your role is to serve as the technical authority — making platform decisions, representing them to client stakeholders, and guiding the team through the complexity of data architecture, privacy-preserving systems, and multi-tenant infrastructure design. You’ll report to Blend’s Chief Solutions Officer while working directly within the delivery team, with regular visibility to the client’s executive leadership.
Requirements
- 10+ years in data or platform architecture, with at least 3 years on systems at significant scale
- Deep experience with Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, or a comparable enterprise data platform
- Demonstrated ability to lead technical strategy in high-stakes client or executive contexts
- Experience designing for privacy, compliance, or security constraints
- Background in consulting delivery or embedded partner roles
- Enterprise data platforms (Snowflake, AWS, or equivalent)
- Real-time and batch data architecture
- ML/AI systems and embeddings infrastructure
- Data privacy frameworks and compliance-by-design approaches
- Clean rooms, DSPs, and SSPs
- You’ve worked directly with CTO-level stakeholders — not through layers
- You move comfortably between technical depth and business context
- You articulate architectural tradeoffs clearly and in terms of business impact
- You’re comfortable in high-stakes client or investor settings
- You ask hard questions about scale, cost, compliance, and risk before committing to approaches
- You hold opinions but update them when presented with better information
- You see your role as unblocking the team, not bottlenecking it
- You’ve worked in embedded delivery or partner roles
- You don’t need to own everything to drive impact
- You value getting to the right answer over being the one with the answer
Nice To Haves
- Clean room or federated data architecture experience
- Embeddings or feature store work
- Identity resolution or data monetization projects
- AWS or cloud infrastructure design
- DSP or SSP experience
Responsibilities
- Define and validate the technical blueprint across cloud data warehouse, clean room infrastructure, embedding compute, and privacy controls
- Own the data modeling strategy for large-scale behavioral signals across multiple data sources and device types
- Design the embeddings architecture and feature store supporting advertising, commerce, and AI use cases
- Guide clean room design and ensure compliance with applicable privacy frameworks
- Identify and resolve critical path blockers across infrastructure, integrations, and identity resolution
- Pressure-test technical proposals against real-world scale and operational complexity
- Bridge between Blend’s engineering and data science teams and the client’s senior technical stakeholders
- Participate in regular leadership touchpoints with the client’s commercial and product leadership
- Translate technical capabilities into commercially relevant differentiation
- Ensure the technical roadmap aligns with go-to-market milestones
- Serve as a credible technical voice in early client and partner conversations
Benefits
- medical, dental, and vision coverage
- a 401(k) plan
- paid time off
- paid holidays
- commuter benefits
- flexible spending accounts
- life and disability insurance
- employee assistance programs
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Principal
Education Level
No Education Listed
