Gen AI Architect

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What the market looks like

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.

Job 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