Staff Architect (AI)

Location: Houston, TX; must be local or able to travel to the Houston customer site every other week. This is a 4-month assignment with potential to extend.

Company

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

What you will do

• Define technical strategy and lead architecture across cloud infrastructure, data platforms, and AI/ML systems.
• Architect scalable cloud-native, multi-cloud, hybrid, microservices, serverless, containerized, and event-driven solutions.
• Design data warehouses, lakes, batch and streaming pipelines, AI/ML platforms, MLOps pipelines, model serving, and LLM applications.
• Establish infrastructure-as-code, CI/CD, DevOps, security, governance, compliance, and observability standards.
• Lead cloud migrations and platform modernization while optimizing performance, scalability, cost, and reliability.
• Partner with clients and leadership, document architecture decisions, mentor engineers, and act as an escalation point for complex technical challenges.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years in architecture or technical leadership.
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms and cloud-native architecture, including AWS, Azure, or GCP.
• Strong experience with infrastructure as code, CI/CD, Kubernetes, Docker, microservices, serverless, and event-driven systems.
• Strong data architecture experience across relational, NoSQL, and big data systems, including data modeling, ETL/ELT, and orchestration.
• Production AI/ML architecture experience, including LLMs, MLOps, model serving, and tools such as SageMaker, Vertex AI, MLflow, Hugging Face, PyTorch, or TensorFlow.
• Strong software engineering, cloud security, networking, identity and access management, stakeholder communication, leadership, and mentoring skills; demonstrable use of AI tools such as Claude and Cursor.

Nice to have

• Multi-cloud architecture experience, AI ethics or responsible AI experience, or enterprise architecture certifications such as TOGAF or AWS, Azure, or GCP certifications.

Culture & Benefits

• Work on production-ready AI systems designed for real enterprise workflows.
• Collaborate with senior teams averaging more than 15 years of experience.
• Operate with strong ownership, direct feedback, attention to craft, and resourcefulness under tight constraints.
• Use modern AI assistants to improve delivery quality and speed.