Principal AI Architect
LPL Financial3 days ago
Austin, TX, USA or New York, NY, USAStaff+
Base Salary
$156k - $260k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own and evolve reference architectures for AI-enabled applications, advisor-facing AI workspaces, agent runtimes, data stores, and supporting services.
- Architect agent routing, context assembly, delegation, memory, artifact continuity, human-in-the-loop controls, structured responses, streaming, latency, error recovery, and multi-intent experiences.
- Define enterprise AI control-plane integration including APIs and SDKs, gateway routing, policy enforcement, managed inference, audit logging, cost attribution, registries, lifecycle states, and kill switches.
- Establish reusable services and controls for memory, knowledge, RAG, evaluation, observability, entitlements, tool and agent execution, rate limiting, incident evidence, and governed access.
- Lead AI product lifecycle governance, risk tiering, production readiness gates, evaluation and regression standards, red-team and safety requirements, release evidence, runbooks, onboarding playbooks, and exception management.
- Define security architecture covering SSO, token flows, delegated authorization, agent identity, least-privilege access, PII protection, content safety, and records retention.
- Lead LLMOps and AgentOps practices for versioning, deployment, monitoring, release management, FinOps, and continuous improvement based on production telemetry.
- Run technology radar activities and proofs of concept for models, agent frameworks, gateways, and evaluation tooling, transitioning successful approaches into reference implementations.
- Mentor solution and software architects, represent AI designs in architecture reviews, and communicate tradeoffs to product, engineering, risk, security, and compliance stakeholders.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience in enterprise, platform, or software architecture involving distributed systems, cloud-native systems, or data-intensive systems.
- 2+ years architecting generative AI, agentic AI, or ML platforms from experimentation through regulated or enterprise production.
- 2+ years owning AI product lifecycle outcomes across governance, security, evaluation, and operations in addition to models.
- 2+ years of hands-on experience with AI applications, agents, RAG, APIs, integrations, and technical proofs of concept, including the ability to review code and designs.
- 7+ years of strong command of cloud-native design, including microservices, APIs, event-driven patterns, containers/Kubernetes, IAM, observability, resilience, and performance.
- Preferred depth with AWS, EKS, Amazon Bedrock, API Gateway, IAM, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, S3, and observability tooling.
- Experience with AI gateways, OpenAI-compatible inference APIs, tool calling, MCP, A2A, multi-agent orchestration, embeddings, and vector search.
- Experience in financial services or another highly regulated domain, including supervisory records, advice-related content controls, or entitlement-heavy systems.
- Knowledge of enterprise identity platforms, non-human identity for agents, and delegated authorization patterns.
- Proficiency in Python, Java, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, DevSecOps, and architecture documentation using C4, sequence diagrams, data-flow diagrams, and ADRs.
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, AI, or a related field.
Benefits
- The role offers 401(k) matching, health benefits, employee stock options, paid time off, volunteer time off, and additional total-rewards benefits.
Tech Stack
Categories
About LPL Financial
LPL Financial is a public wealth management platform and the largest independent broker-dealer, providing brokerage, custody, clearing, research, and advisor technology to independent financial advisors and financial institutions. Its revenue comes from advisory and brokerage fees, commissions, and clearing and service fees across multiple affiliation models. Founded in 1989 and headquartered in San Diego, it trades on Nasdaq (LPLA) and supports more than 29,000 advisors and roughly 1,100 institutions nationwide.