Lead AI Architect - Data Platform
Banyan Software6 days ago
Remote, United StatesStaff+
Responsibilities
- Define and own Banyan’s target-state data and AI architecture and document architectural trade-offs.
- Design, build, and operate a centralized AWS data lake with standardized storage, cataloging, querying, ingestion, modeling, and lineage patterns.
- Establish an AI experimentation layer covering model access, RAG, evaluation, observability, cost controls, and safe productionization.
- Create data contracts, schema standards, naming conventions, and a durable domain model for acquired companies and new data sources.
- Partner with Senior Business Analysts and functional leaders in Finance, M&A, and Business Development to translate use cases into platform requirements.
- Define data classification, access tiering, privacy, PII, regulated-data, confidential-data, and AI safety guardrails.
- Write code, ship infrastructure, conduct code reviews, and debug production issues.
- Build and mentor a platform team, including hiring contractors and vertical-aligned Senior Business AI Analysts, data platform engineers, ML platform engineers, and data engineers.
- Own platform reliability, observability, SLOs, usage monitoring, and cost management.
- Represent Banyan’s AI and data architecture to executives, portfolio companies, and external partners.
Requirements
- 10+ years building and operating production data and AI platforms at meaningful scale.
- Deep hands-on AWS expertise, including S3, IAM, KMS, networking, Glue, Lake Formation, Athena, Redshift, SageMaker, Bedrock, and EKS or ECS.
- Strong experience with lakehouse patterns, open table formats, data modeling, ingestion frameworks, orchestration, and data lineage.
- Experience with feature stores, model registries, experiment tracking, prompt and evaluation frameworks, RAG, and basic agentic workflows.
- Working knowledge of AI safety, data classification, PII handling, access tiering, evaluation, and model-risk controls.
- Strong Python and SQL skills and practical experience with Terraform or AWS CDK.
- Player-coach experience leading small teams, mentoring engineers, setting hiring standards, and developing people.
- Strong communication skills for architecture reviews with engineers and explaining trade-offs to executives.
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field; a master’s degree is preferred but not required.
- Experience in private-equity-backed or holding-company environments, AI guardrails for sensitive data, internal platforms treated as products, or being an early platform hire is preferred.
- Experience with Snowflake or Databricks is preferred.
Benefits
- 100% remote work arrangement.
- Full-time role with competitive benefits and meaningful long-term upside.
- Greenfield platform work with a real budget and ownership of AI and data architecture for an entire holding company.
- Long-term platform-building horizon and accountable autonomy.
- Base compensation is CAD $180,000 to $210,000 plus performance bonus and benefits.
Categories
Data EngineeringML Engineering
About Banyan Software
Banyan Software acquires, operates, and grows vertical‑market enterprise software businesses, offering permanent ownership and shared operational expertise. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Atlanta, it follows a buy‑hold‑and‑grow model backed by permanent capital, managing more than 120 portfolio companies across North and South America, Europe, and APAC. It targets niche B2B vendors with high recurring revenue, strong retention, and positive cash flow.