[Hiring] Practice Architect II - AI/ML @TEKsystems

Role Description

The Practice Architect II (AI/ML) is a senior hands-on architect who owns technical direction and delivery execution for customer engagements building AI-powered applications and digital platforms. The architect sets architecture direction and engineering standards, writes and reviews production code, and leads onshore and offshore engineering teams from design through production. This is a delivery role, not pre-sales. It is also not an individual contributor role; the architect is accountable for the output of the teams they lead.

Key Accountabilities & Priorities

• Full Stack Agentic AI Architecture
  • Own architecture direction for agentic AI and full-stack solutions across assigned engagements.
  • Translate business and technical requirements into scalable, sustainable solution architectures.
  • Set the architecture standards and design patterns delivery teams build against.
  • Own code review and architecture review gates; make the final call on technical trade-offs.
• Product Engineering & Innovation
  • Write production code for customer engagements - approximately 40-60% of time.
  • Build and own reusable accelerators, frameworks, and reference architectures that carry across engagements.
  • Evaluate emerging technologies and architecture patterns, and decide what enters the stack.
  • Unblock engineering teams on implementation problems.
• Delivery and Customer Relationship
  • Provide technical direction to engineering pods of engineers across concurrent engagements.
  • Lead offshore technical leads; ensure design intent survives handoff to distributed teams.
  • Mentor engineers on architecture, code quality, and modern engineering practice.
  • Serve as the senior technical voice to customer architects, engineering leaders, and executives.
  • Explain architecture decisions, risks, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
  • Surface technical risks and dependencies early, with mitigation options.
  • Drive alignment across customer product, engineering, and business stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
• 10+ years in software engineering and architecture, including 3+ years as a lead or principal architect.
• 2+ years building production AI/agentic systems deployed and operating, not pilots or proofs of concept.
• Has onboarded enterprise data and built a governed knowledge or semantic layer, including entitlement and lineage.
• Can describe the security and identity model for agents acting on enterprise data.
• Currently coding; able to complete a hands-on technical assessment.
• Experience leading offshore or distributed engineering teams.
• Has defined RACI across customer, onshore, and offshore teams on a live engagement.
• Cloud-agnostic: production delivery on at least two of AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Customer-facing experience at engineering-leadership and executive level.

Requirements

• Agentic AI, AI-powered solution design, and modern application architecture.
• Solution architecture and system design.
• Hands-on software development and prototyping.
• AI-assisted coding at scale for production deployment.
• Code reviews, engineering standards, and quality governance.
• Enterprise data onboarding: source access, ownership, entitlement, classification, and quality gating.
• Knowledge fabric: governed, queryable knowledge layer over enterprise data - semantic modeling, entity resolution, lineage, freshness.
• RAG and retrieval architecture: vector and hybrid search, embedding pipelines, retrieval quality tuning, context and memory management.
• Agent security: agent identity, least-privilege tool access, data-boundary enforcement, audit.
• Agent execution harness: tool and component boundaries, orchestration, failure handling, human-in-the-loop.
• Evaluation: offline and online harnesses, regression suites, groundedness and retrieval quality metrics, cost and latency instrumentation.
• Cloud-agnostic delivery: portable across AWS, Azure, and GCP rather than tied to one provider's managed AI services.
• Stack: Python and TypeScript/Node, strong SQL, agent frameworks (LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or equivalent), MCP, containers, CI/CD, IaC.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental, and Vision.
• Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital.
• 401(k) Retirement Plan - Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions available.
• Life Insurance (Voluntary Life and AD&D for employee and dependents).
• Short and Long-Term Disability.
• Health Spending Account (HSA).
• Transportation Benefits.
• Employee Assistance Program.
• Time Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave).

Job Type & Location

This is a Permanent position based out of Alexandria, VA.

Application Deadline

This position is anticipated to close on Nov 17, 2026.

Workplace Type

This is a fully remote position.