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Principal, AI Architect

Releady
15 days ago
Contract
On-site
California, United States
$90,100 - $90,100 USD yearly
Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
OVERVIEW

We are partnering with a newly formed, well-funded healthcare technology company — backed by a major non-profit healthcare consortium — to hire a Principal AI Architect. This organization is building the universal operating system for healthcare: an AI-native, event-driven platform purpose-built to eliminate the fragmentation and inefficiency that has long defined how payers, providers, and patients connect. Operating exclusively as a cloud and AI-native enterprise on Microsoft Azure, we are seeking industry veterans who bring a disruptive startup mentality. There is zero tolerance for legacy click-ops, siloed thinking, or manual infrastructure management.

In this role, you will join the Commercialization platform engineering team and take architectural ownership of the Internal Developer Platform (IDP) ecosystem and commercialization tooling. You will design, build, and evangelize cloud-native infrastructure and autonomous AI agents that drive transformative operational excellence across the enterprise.

    • Pay Rate: $90 – $100/hr
    • Duration: 6-month contract-to-hire (*Must be eligible to work on W2 without sponsorship. Not eligible for C2C.)
    • Location: Hybrid; 2x/week in office — San Diego, Long Beach, Sacramento, Rancho Cordova, or Oakland (SF Bay Area)
RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Cloud-Native Platform Architecture

    • Design and build the core AI-native Internal Developer Platform (IDP) using Go, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Terraform, and GitOps, eliminating legacy infrastructure management and enabling high-velocity DevSecOps at scale.
    • Champion an everything-as-code engineering culture using Terraform for infrastructure provisioning, with zero reliance on manual GUI configurations or click-ops.

    Autonomous AI Development

    • Design and embed autonomous AI workflows into the commercialization platform using Azure OpenAI, RAG pipelines, and custom LLM tooling.
    • Automate complex data workflows, system discovery, and infrastructure deployment through intelligent agentic systems.

    Distributed Systems & Integration

    • Lead technical integration of intelligent data hubs, orchestrating high-volume, secure healthcare data via modern APIs, microservices, and enterprise event-driven architecture patterns.
    • Ensure platform resilience, scalability, and security across a regulated healthcare environment.

    Engineering Excellence & Mentorship

    • Champion a full-stack developer mindset across the enterprise, mentoring cross-functional delivery teams on modern Go, Kubernetes, and AI-first engineering practices.
    • Set and uphold architectural standards that enable teams to move fast without accumulating technical debt.

    Executive Collaboration

    • Partner with C-suite and product leadership to translate complex commercialization strategies into secure, resilient, and disruptive technical roadmaps.
    • Serve as a credible technical voice in strategic planning, roadmap decisions, and stakeholder communications.
QUALIFICATIONS
    • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience, plus 10+ years of distributed systems engineering.
    • 4+ years of hands-on architectural experience building scalable microservices in Go (Golang) and deploying to Kubernetes (AKS strongly preferred).
    • 2+ years of production experience integrating Large Language Models, building RAG architectures, and developing autonomous AI agents using Azure OpenAI, Copilot, or equivalent platforms.
    • Mastery of GitOps, CI/CD pipelines, Terraform, and observability tooling with a strict infrastructure-as-code mindset; all infrastructure managed as code with no exceptions.
    • Hands-on Terraform expertise for provisioning and managing Azure infrastructure at scale; experience with modular Terraform design patterns and remote state management strongly preferred.
    • Proven ability to design secure, compliant architectures in highly regulated domains without sacrificing engineering velocity.
    • Strong architectural understanding of modern front-end frameworks (e.g., React) to ensure APIs and backend platforms power seamless user experiences.

    Preferred

    • Experience designing and shipping AI systems within a healthcare technology or other regulated enterprise environment.
    • Familiarity with vector databases, semantic search, and multi-agent orchestration frameworks.
    • Background operating in Azure-first or Microsoft-aligned cloud environments.
    • Advanced degree in Computer Science or a related engineering discipline.
 
We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or other non-merit factor. We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment for all employees.