Senior Director, Data & ML Architecture

ELLKAY, LLC

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

Senior Director of Data and AI/ML Architecture is the technical leader responsible for designing and guiding the end-to-end architecture of data & machine learning systems across the enterprise. This role focuses on building scalable, reliable, and secure AI platforms, services, and patterns that power core products and internal decisioning

Requirements

10+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, or AI/ML, with 5+ years focused on AI system design.
Hands-on expertise with modern ML Engineering stack (e.g., Sagemaker, Spark, Kubernetes, feature stores, vector databases).
Proven experience architecting large-scale AI platforms and production ML systems (training and low-latency inference).
Strong understanding of MLOps practices, observability, and reliability for AI workloads.
Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field (or equivalent experience).

Responsibilities

Define and maintain the technical architecture for AI systems, including model development, training, inference, and monitoring.
Design reference architectures and reusable components for LLMs, agentic AI, recommendation systems, and predictive models.
Partner with data engineering, product, and platform teams to translate business requirements into AI solutions and services.
Establish standards for model lifecycle management, including feature stores, MLOps, CI/CD for ML, and experiment tracking.
Collaborate with security, compliance, and legal teams to ensure responsible, secure, and compliant AI usage.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship to AI/ML engineers, data scientists, and platform engineers.
Evaluate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and tools, and drive their adoption where appropriate.
Create technical documentation, architectural guidelines, and decision records to ensure alignment and reusability.