District Partners is supporting a prestigious global professional services organization in hiring an AI/ML Architect (and Senior Architect level) for a direct-hire opportunity. This hybrid role requires two days onsite each week, and candidates must reside within commuting distance of one of the firm’s approved office locations, including New York, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington DC, Reston, Chicago, San Diego, Colorado, or Seattle.

This position sits within the organization’s innovation and technology function, responsible for architecting and delivering enterprise-scale AI and ML solutions that transform how the business operates and serves clients. The AI/ML Architect will design and implement cloud-native architectures across Azure, AWS, and enterprise data lake environments, driving intelligent automation, large-scale analytics, and secure, compliant machine learning systems. The ideal candidate blends architectural depth with hands-on engineering experience and a strong command of modern data platforms and MLOps frameworks.

What You'll Do:

• Design and implement end-to-end AI/ML architectures across Azure, AWS, and enterprise data lakes to support production-grade, large-scale solutions.
• Build and optimize data ingestion, transformation, and model-training pipelines leveraging data lakes, warehouses, APIs, and streaming frameworks (e.g., Kafka, Kinesis).
• Partner with engineering and business teams to translate complex requirements into scalable, high-performance AI and ML solutions.
• Integrate AI/ML systems with enterprise data platforms and applications through APIs, orchestration frameworks, and automation tools.
• Establish and enforce architecture standards, governance, and best practices for AI/ML development across cloud environments.
• Optimize performance, scalability, and cost efficiency of cloud-based workloads using native services like Azure Machine Learning, AWS SageMaker, and GCP Vertex AI.
• Ensure solutions adhere to strict security, compliance, and data privacy standards.
• Evaluate and recommend emerging AI/ML technologies, including LLMs, LangChain-style orchestration, vector databases, and transformer architectures.
• Implement and manage MLOps pipelines for model versioning, CI/CD automation, and lifecycle management.
• Champion ethical and responsible AI, supporting transparency, fairness, and bias mitigation in deployed models.

What You'll Have:

• 5+ years of directly applicable experience designing and delivering enterprise AI/ML systems (7+ years for senior-level candidates).
• Hands-on experience architecting AI/ML solutions on Azure and/or AWS, including compute, storage, and ML services.
• Proven expertise working with enterprise data lakes and data-integration pipelines (ETL/ELT, lakehouse, or cloud-native architectures).
• Skilled in integrating ML workloads with data warehouses, APIs, and streaming systems.
• Strong understanding of cloud security, governance, and data privacy frameworks.
• Advanced proficiency in Python and frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn.
• Practical experience with MLOps tools (e.g., MLflow, Kubeflow, SageMaker) and DevOps automation for deployment and monitoring.
• Strong analytical and critical-thinking skills for evaluating architecture trade-offs and performance tuning.
• Excellent communication skills and proven success partnering across technical and business teams.
• Willingness to work occasional extended or weekend hours for major releases or infrastructure changes.
• Ability to travel occasionally for collaboration and cross-office initiatives.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, AI/ML, Data Science, or related discipline.
• Experience architecting systems with LLMs, vector databases, or transformer-based models.
• Familiarity with data lakehouse design patterns and federated data access.
• Knowledge of AI governance, explainability, and bias mitigation frameworks.