Principal OT AI Solution Architect

Location: Houston, Texas, United States of America

Company

hirify.global’s OT Artificial Intelligence Team provides technical leadership and execution support for evaluating, architecting and operationalizing AI in operational technology environments.

What you will do

• Author and shepherd OT AI reference architectures and reusable design patterns through OT Architecture and cybersecurity review.
• Define deployment guardrails covering human oversight, fail-safe behavior, degraded modes, rollback, explainability and auditability.
• Establish architecture patterns for edge AI, retrieval augmented generation, computer vision, predictive and prescriptive analytics, generative AI, agentic systems and physical AI.
• Own AI model lifecycle architecture, including intake, validation, versioning, deployment, monitoring, drift detection, retraining triggers, retirement and rollback.
• Define requirements for training, validation and inference data, and design secure data movement across environments.
• Evaluate vendors, platforms and models; design testing, risk assessments, documentation, observability and operational readiness evidence; and partner with architecture, cybersecurity, operations, engineering, data science and business teams.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 8 or more years of experience in operational technology, industrial automation or industrial AI, including significant solution architecture responsibility.
• Experience architecting, deploying or governing AI and machine learning solutions in operational or safety-adjacent environments.
• Experience with model lifecycle management, including validation, versioning, monitoring, drift detection, retraining, rollback and retirement.
• Experience defining AI safety guardrails, human-in-the-loop controls, fallback behavior and operational acceptance criteria.
• Experience designing edge AI solutions for constrained, intermittently connected or disconnected industrial environments.
• Working knowledge of OT cybersecurity, the Purdue reference model and ISA/IEC 62443 zone and conduit concepts as applied to AI systems.
• Understanding of AI data requirements, including provenance, quality, labeling, contextualization, privacy, retention and secure movement.
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Azure AI and machine learning services and hybrid or on-premises deployment patterns.
• Ability to communicate AI design decisions, alternatives, risks and consequences to engineers, data scientists, cyber reviewers, operators and business sponsors.
• Ability to reach a defensible technical verdict on AI vendors, platforms and models by distinguishing claims from verified capability.

Nice to have

• Master’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Data Science or a related field.
• Experience architecting generative AI, agentic AI or multimodal systems for operational environments.
• Experience with computer vision, physical AI, robotics, drones or autonomous systems in industrial settings.
• Experience with MLOps platforms and model lifecycle automation across cloud, on-premises and edge environments.
• Experience with responsible AI, model risk management, explainability, bias testing and assurance evidence.
• Experience creating curated, labeled or synthetic industrial datasets; familiarity with industrial semantic models, knowledge graphs, digital twins or asset context.
• Experience with edge AI accelerators, containerized inference, orchestration, AI observability, performance monitoring and incident response.
• Upstream, midstream or downstream domain experience and comfort working directly with asset and operations personnel.
• Experience with stage-gated AI evaluation processes, including publishing no-go decisions.

Culture & Benefits

• Work as part of a highly technical, creative and cross-functional OT Artificial Intelligence Team.
• Contribute within an embedded Agile team and maintain the OT AI architecture roadmap.
• Relocation will not be considered.
• Expatriate assignments will not be considered.
• Employment visa sponsorship and consideration of time-limited visa status are not available.