Principal AI Architect

Join SecurityScorecard as a Principal AI Architect, where you will lead the system design of our agentic AI capabilities and serve as a technical anchor for engineering teams. This individual contributor role reports to the Chief Architect and requires deep expertise in distributed systems, data engineering fundamentals, and experience in building and architecting agentic or LLM-powered systems in production. You will communicate complex architectural decisions clearly to executives and customers, mentor senior and staff engineers, and drive the shift to AI-assisted and agentic development across engineering.

• Lead the system design for agentic AI capabilities, focusing on orchestration, state, memory, and reliability patterns.
• Write Technical Design Reviews (TDRs), design documents, and standards that set architectural direction for agentic work across teams.
• Prototype to validate architectural decisions before teams commit to them at scale, and mentor senior and staff engineers on agentic system design.

• We're looking for someone who can go deep technically and also move a room: an architect whose designs get adopted because they're well-reasoned and well-communicated, not just handed down
• Deep expertise in distributed systems: service boundaries, consistency models, event-driven architecture, API design (REST; gRPC familiarity a plus), and operating systems reliably at scale
• Working knowledge of data engineering fundamentals, including data modeling, pipeline design, and streaming vs. batch, sufficient to make informed architectural calls without deep specialization in the domain
• 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time as a senior, staff, or principal-level architect or technical lead designing production systems
• Comfort operating as a senior individual contributor, driving outcomes through prototyping and technical credibility
• Hands-on experience building, prototyping, and architecting agentic or LLM-powered systems in production, not just demos: agent loop design, context engineering, MCP and tool/function-calling integration, RAG architectures, memory and state management, and reliability and guardrail patterns for non-deterministic systems
• Ability to communicate complex architectural decisions clearly to executives and customers
• A track record of influence without authority: presenting a technical direction to skeptical engineers and earning genuine buy-in, and giving rigorous design review feedback on systems you didn't build yourself
• Strong technical writing and mentorship: TDRs, design docs, and decision records that teams can act on without hand-holding, plus a history of raising the technical bar around you
• Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns (supervisor and sub-agent architectures, agent handoffs), which our use cases are likely to grow toward
• Experience with our stack or comparable technologies: Node.js/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kafka, AWS, Kubernetes
• Experience leading AI-assisted or agentic development adoption across an engineering organization; given the scope of this work at SecurityScorecard, this carries significant weight
• Experience partnering closely with data science or ML teams on productionizing their work
• Cybersecurity industry background