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Job market data

Generative AI architect roles have emerged as a distinct specialty over the past eighteen months, and the market is still shaking out — we see strong hiring across Bay Area product companies, Boston-area research-adjacent firms, and larger enterprise platforms. Base compensation for senior GenAI architects generally falls in a $160K–$290K range, and the strongest candidates we place are those who've shipped real production generative systems, not just prototypes — RAG, agents, evaluation, and safety all need to be real.

Key responsibilities

Lead technical design for generative AI products, platforms, and internal tooling
Architect RAG, agentic, and fine-tuning patterns appropriate to each use case rather than defaulting to one stack
Partner closely with product and research teams on evaluation methodology, safety, and release criteria
Own model selection, orchestration patterns, and the cost and latency trade-offs at scale
Contribute to the company's internal standards on responsible AI deployment and red-teaming
Mentor senior engineers and represent the architecture function externally when needed
Run technical design reviews across teams and raise the bar for what "production GenAI" means internally
Stay close to the frontier and translate new research into practical architectural bets

Candidate requirements

8+ years of senior engineering experience including deep LLM and generative AI work
Direct experience with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent orchestration frameworks
Strong grasp of retrieval systems, embeddings, and modern vector infrastructure
Track record of architecting production generative AI systems (not just prototypes)
Excellent stakeholder communication and technical writing
Comfort making trade-offs under uncertainty and iterating as the field evolves

Gen AI Architect