Principal Architect

Sutherland

Principal Architect designing and building advanced AI solutions and production APIs. Engaging in backend engineering and multi-modal integration for complex enterprise workflows.

Posted 7/8/2026contractRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesLeadWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

ElasticSearchFFmpegGoJavaJavaScriptPythonReactTypeScript

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Experience building agentic harnesses from scratch, including capabilities such as tool use, multi-step chaining, reasoning, streaming, skills, multimodal integration, RAG, sandboxing, and state management.
Experience designing, building, and operating production APIs and services, including RESTful APIs, streaming APIs, asynchronous workflows, service boundaries, versioning, authentication/authorization, error handling, and backward compatibility.
Strong judgment around when to use synchronous APIs, event-driven architectures, queues, background jobs, or streaming protocols based on latency, reliability, scalability, and user experience requirements.
Demonstrated ownership of production systems, including process improvements, roadmap contributions, defect resolution, uptime and availability monitoring, and operational reliability.
Strong backend engineering fundamentals, with comfort working across service design, APIs, batch workflows, orchestration, observability, and production support.
Familiarity with evaluation techniques such as creating and maintaining evaluation datasets, running offline regression evals, monitoring online production performance, rubric-based scoring, self-verification, human-in-the-loop review, AI-as-judge methods, and quality/reliability analysis at scale.
Clear understanding of foundational machine learning and statistical concepts, including sampling, statistical significance, overfitting/underfitting, precision and recall, and quality tradeoff analysis.
Experience building and orchestrating large-scale batch workflows that use foundation models, including LLMs and VLMs, as well as pretrained open-source models and deep learning models.
Ability to design systems that safely and reliably automate meaningful enterprise workflows using non-deterministic AI components.
Strong judgment around reliability, failure handling, observability, human review, and operational safety.
Deep understanding of how to make systematic tradeoffs between quality, reliability, latency, cost, explainability, and user experience in complex AI systems.
Ability to design pragmatic architectures that balance innovation with production readiness.
Comfort working in environments where model behavior is non-deterministic and system design must account for uncertainty, evaluation, monitoring, and graceful failure.
Experience with both lexical and embedding-based search methods.
Ability to reason about relevance, ranking, latency, recall, precision, indexing strategy, and retrieval performance.
Experience working with foundation models and open-source LLMs beyond simple API calls.
Familiarity with lower-level model behaviors and controls, including temperature, top-p sampling, logprobs, confidence scoring, prompting strategies, and model selection tradeoffs.
Comfort and willingness to build front-end experiences using JavaScript/TypeScript and frameworks such as React.
While the role is primarily backend and AI systems focused, the ability to contribute to user-facing product experiences is important.
Willingness to work across the stack and own the end-to-end product experience is essential.
Familiarity with tools such as FFmpeg, OpenCV, or similar media-processing libraries is a plus.

Requirements

What you’ll need

7+ years of a programming languages such as Java, Golang, Python, JavaScript
2+ years of experience architecting, designing, and optimizing search and information retrieval systems at scale.
6 months to 1 year of hands-on experience building agentic products or solutions, including tool-using agents, conversational agents, long-running agents, reasoning/planning agents, or similar systems.
Experience with multiple modern agent frameworks is preferred.
1+ year of experience evaluating AI systems for quality, reliability, and safety at scale.
5+ years of experience shipping production software in an enterprise or consumer environment, not just prototypes or proofs of concept.
OpenSearch or Elasticsearch experience is preferred, but comparable experience with other search and retrieval systems is sufficient.
Expert experience, understanding and knowledge of digital and broadcast production operations and workflows
Experience working with video, rich visual media, or multimodal AI systems.
Strong knowledge of industry trends and best practices
Strong experience with the C4 model and other traditional design artifacts
Experience working in an Agile environment

Benefits

Comp & perks

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
EEOC and Veteran Documentation
During employment, employees are treated without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital or veteran status, medical condition or handicap, or any other legally protected status.

ATS Keywords

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Applicant Tracking System Keywords

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Hard Skills & Tools

JavaGolangPythonJavaScriptRESTful APIsAsynchronous WorkflowsStatistical ConceptsBatch WorkflowsAgentic ProductsDigital Production Operations

Soft Skills

Strong JudgmentOwnership of Production SystemsCollaboration Across the Stack