Principal Data Architect (AI)

Location: Remote in Canada or the United States

Salary: $170,000–$240,000 USD annually in the United States; $190,000–$260,000 CAD annually in Canada.

Company

Robots & Pencils is an applied AI engineering firm that designs and delivers AI co-workers and enterprise systems for clients across multiple industries.

What you will do

• Set data architecture standards across warehouses, data lakes, lakehouses, medallion architectures, and open table formats.
• Define governance, lineage, quality, cataloging, access control, compliance, and evaluation-data strategies for enterprise data and AI systems.
• Architect batch and streaming platforms, orchestration, data models, data products, data mesh approaches, and data foundations for AI/ML.
• Design feature stores, embeddings and vector stores, RAG pipelines, semantic layers, knowledge graphs, and unstructured data pipelines.
• Establish infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, security, performance, scalability, cost, and reliability standards.
• Partner with leadership and clients, support pre-sales, mentor engineers and architects, and remain hands-on with prototypes, production code, design reviews, and pull requests.

Requirements

• Principal-level expertise in data architecture and the ability to lead high-stakes platform and integration decisions.
• Experience with data warehouses, lakes, lakehouses, batch and streaming systems, enterprise data modeling, and orchestration.
• Strong knowledge of data and AI governance, security, compliance, data residency, audit readiness, and regulated data such as PII.
• Experience designing scalable AI/ML data foundations, including retrieval pipelines, vector stores, semantic layers, knowledge graphs, and unstructured data systems.
• Ability to communicate complex architecture clearly to engineering, executive, leadership, and client stakeholders.
• Ability to work remotely from Canada or the United States.

Nice to have

• Experience with GDPR, HIPAA, SOC 2, feature stores, RAG, data mesh, Data Vault, or data product paradigms.
• Experience creating reusable accelerators, reference architectures, templates, and delivery standards.
• Experience using modern AI assistants such as Claude or Cursor in engineering work.

Culture & Benefits

• Senior, high-ownership environment focused on shipping production-ready AI quickly.
• Collaboration across engineering, AI, analytics, product, leadership, and client organizations.
• Paid time off and medical, dental, and vision insurance for eligible employees.
• 401(k) matching in the United States and RRSP matching in Canada for eligible employees.
• Employment may be conditional on a background check in accordance with local legislation.