Sr. AI Platform Architect at Parts Town Unlimited in Addison, IL

Job description

The Job at a Glance The Senior AI Platform Architect owns the architecture, standards, and technical direction of our enterprise AI ecosystem, spanning platforms, models, agents, and integrations. This role ensures AI solutions are scalable, secure, compliant, and aligned with business goals. As a hands-on senior leader, you will design and guide delivery of AI agents, assistants, RAG solutions, and AI-powered workflows, partnering closely with data, infrastructure, security, application, and business teams. This is a senior individual contributor role with a path to platform leadership as the AI function grows. The ideal candidate combines enterprise architecture expertise with hands-on experience building AI solutions using modern agent frameworks, APIs, function calling, Model Context Protocol (MCP), enterprise SaaS platforms, and cloud-native technologies. Key Responsibilities AI Platform Strategy & Architecture Define enterprise AI platform architecture, standards, and guardrails aligned with the broader technology strategy. Establish reference architectures, approved tooling, and reusable patterns for agents, retrieval, and orchestration. Evaluate emerging AI technologies and recommend adoption, integration, and governance approaches. Document architectural decisions that balance innovation, scalability, cost, and risk. AI Solutions & Agent Development Translate business needs into production-ready AI solutions, including agents, assistants, RAG, and workflows. Design agentic capabilities using function calling, MCP, model orchestration, memory, and grounding. Guide teams hands-on from proof of concept through deployment and operationalization. Ensure solutions follow established platform and engineering standards. Enterprise Integration & Data Architect integrations between AI platforms, enterprise applications, collaboration tools, and business systems. Align AI solutions with the enterprise data ecosystem, using governed data that preserves quality and meaning. Design secure APIs, connectors, and event-driven integrations that respect source-system permissions. Partner with engineering teams to deliver reliable, scalable, and supportable integrations. Governance, Security & Compliance Define and enforce AI governance frameworks, policies, and operating standards. Establish controls for model deployment, agent publishing, integration approval, and lifecycle management. Partner with Security and Compliance on identity, access, data protection, and regulatory requirements. Lead AI-specific risk assessments for new capabilities, integrations, and vendors. Platform Operations & Reliability Define standards for monitoring, observability, incident response, and platform support. Establish evaluation methods for agent quality, safety, grounding accuracy, and production readiness. Track platform health, adoption, and value realization through clear metrics and dashboards. Serve as the senior escalation point for AI platform and integration issues. Technical Leadership Lead architecture reviews and communicate decisions clearly to technical and business audiences. Coach engineers and architects, building a bench for future AI platform leadership. Influence cross-functional priorities through technical expertise and pragmatic judgment. Act as the go-to expert for enterprise AI architecture and platform engineering. To Land This Opportunity You bring a bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline. You have spent 8+ years shaping enterprise architecture, software engineering, or platform engineering initiatives at scale. You have successfully designed, built, and deployed enterprise-grade AI solutions and intelligent agent ecosystems. You possess deep expertise in agentic AI, including MCP, function calling, tool orchestration, and context management strategies. You understand the AI landscape end-to-end, with a strong command of RAG, LLMs and SLMs, semantic search, AI evaluation, monitorin