Principal AI Architect - Baldwin Risk Partners, LLC

Position Summary

The Principal, AI Architect is the organization’s senior-most technical authority for designing and guiding the development of scalable, secure, and compliant AI platforms and capabilities. This role defines architectural direction, establishes engineering standards and reference patterns, and provides strategic technical leadership across multiple business and technology teams. Operating as an expert-level individual contributor, the Principal, AI Architect translates business use cases into robust platform designs, drives decisions on tooling, frameworks, and model integration, and ensures that AI systems meet enterprise requirements for performance, reliability, and regulatory compliance. This role tackles multi-dimensional, highly complex technical challenges with substantial autonomy. Additionally, this role influences senior leadership, partners across functions including Data, Product, Security, and Enterprise Technology, and provides guidance to engineering teams building AI solutions. The role introduces new architectural approaches, evaluates emerging technologies, and shapes the long-term roadmap for the firm’s AI ecosystem.

Primary Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the enterprise‑grade AI platform architecture, including orchestration layers, LLM integration patterns, vector/RAG pipelines, agent frameworks, API mesh, and reusable shared services.
• Develop architectural standards, guardrails, and reference designs governing how engineering teams build and integrate AI workloads.
• Translate business and product requirements into detailed technical designs, ensuring scalability, security, reliability, and alignment with enterprise architecture principles.
• Evaluate build‑vs‑buy decisions for AI components, frameworks, and cloud services; develop recommendations and influence cross‑functional stakeholders.
• Review solution designs from engineering teams; identify risks, surface architectural gaps, and recommend long‑term, sustainable approaches.
• Partner with Security, Compliance, Legal, and Risk to embed SOX, SOC 2, PCI, PII, data residency, and other regulatory requirements into architectural designs.
• Collaborate with Data Platform teams to define data access patterns, boundaries, governance expectations, and integration mechanisms aligned with enterprise data strategy.
• Lead development of architectural decision records (ADRs), integration specifications, and platform documentation supporting engineering and compliance readiness.
• Assess LLM providers, model hosting patterns (e.g., Bedrock, SageMaker, open-source models), and orchestration frameworks; continuously recommend improvements based on evaluation of emerging capabilities.
• Drive cross-functional alignment on AI design choices and platform evolution; facilitate architectural reviews, design sessions, and technical deep dives.
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