Principal Engineer Architect

Principal Enterprise AI Architect

Position Details:

About the Company:

Albertsons is transforming the future of retail by embracing cutting-edge digital, data, and AI technologies. Our mission is to reinvent how customers shop and how our teams operate by embedding intelligence and automation across the enterprise. As part of this journey, we are expanding our AI and GenAI platform capabilities to enable next-generation experiences, decision-making, and operational excellence.

Role Summary:

The Principal Enterprise AI Architect serves as a senior technology leader responsible for defining the enterprise architecture strategy, reference models, and platform capabilities for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and generative AI systems across Albertsons. As an individual contributor, this role partners with engineering, product, AI and data science teams to design scalable, secure, and cost-efficient architectures that accelerate AI adoption, maturity and innovation.
Key Responsibilities:

• Define and evolve the enterprise AI platform architecture technologies, standards, and best practices - aligned to organizational business strategy.
• Architect scalable, secure, and resilient cloud-native AI/ML and GenAI platforms supporting training, fine-tuning, inference, vector search, and RAG pipelines.
• Develop and maintain reference architectures, blueprints, technology roadmaps, and reusable platform assets.
• Establish standards for observability, metadata management, model registries, etc. across the AI lifecycle.
• Partner with security, risk, and compliance teams to implement responsible AI frameworks, guardrails, and governance.
• Partner with cross-functional teams and provide architectural guidance to engineering, product managers, and data scientists.
• Drive the enterprise architecture review process for AI/ML and GenAI initiatives, ensuring adherence to standards.
• Provide expert leadership in model deployment strategies, GPU/accelerator optimization, multi-cloud scaling, and cost efficiency.
• Collaborate with AI Platform Engineering teams by providing architectural direction and guidance, defining standards and patterns, and ensuring governance and oversight.
• Support innovation efforts, including prototypes, pilots, and next-gen architectures (e.g., agent-based AI, enterprise semantic layers).
• Communicate architectural decisions, trade-offs, and recommendations to senior executives and stakeholders.

Required Qualifications:

• 12+ years of experience in enterprise architecture, platform architecture, or distributed systems engineering.
• 5+ years of experience architecting AI/ML or GenAI platforms at enterprise scale.
• Deep expertise with cloud platforms (Azure and/or GCP, AWS optional), AI/ML frameworks, Kubernetes, microservices, and GPU/accelerated computing.
• Deep understanding of LLMs, vector databases, RAG architecture, LangChain/Lang Graph, and orchestration frameworks.
• Strong background in MLOps, model lifecycle management, CI/CD for ML, model observability, and data pipelines.
• Proficiency with Python and modern AI/ML toolchains (PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, Ray, Kubeflow, MLflow).
• Strong grounding in AI security, governance, risk management, privacy, and compliance principles.
• Strong communication, leadership, collaboration and executive influencing skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience driving enterprise-scale AI platform transformations.
• Hands-on experience fine-tuning and deploying LLMs, including open-source and proprietary models.
• Experience in retail, supply chain, e-commerce, or other large-scale data-driven industries.
• Prior role as Principal Architect, Distinguished Engineer, or equivalent senior technical position.
• Contributions to open-source AI or ML frameworks.

What Success Looks Like:

• Enterprise-wide adoption of secure, scalable AI/ML and GenAI platforms.
• Consistent application of architectural standards, reference patterns, and guardrails.
• Accelerated time-to-market for AI initiatives through reusable platform capabilities.
• Increased operational efficiency through improved deployment, monitoring, and governance.
• Strong collaboration across engineering, product, security, and data science organizations.

Why Join Us:

• Influence and shape the future of AI and GenAI across a Fortune 100 company.
• Work on high-impact initiatives that touch millions of customers and thousands of employees.
• Collaborate with a world-class team of technologists, architects, data scientists, and product leaders.
• Competitive compensation, strong benefits, and career advancement opportunities.