Principal AI Architect

Principal AI Architect Hybrid (Austin, TX) SecurityScorecard is the global leader in cybersecurity ratings, with over 12 million companies continuously rated, operating in 64 countries. Founded in 2013 by security and risk experts Dr. Alex Yampolskiy and Sam Kassoumeh and funded by world-class investors, SecurityScorecard's patented rating technology is used by over 25,000 organizations for self-monitoring, third-party risk management, board reporting, and cyber insurance underwriting; making all organizations more resilient by allowing them to easily find and fix cybersecurity risks across their digital footprint. Headquartered in New York City, our culture has been recognized by Inc Magazine as a "Best Workplace," by Crain's NY as a "Best Places to Work in NYC," and as one of the 10 hottest SaaS startups in New York for two years in a row. Most recently, SecurityScorecard was named to Fast Company's annual list of the World's Most Innovative Companies for 2023 and to the Achievers 50 Most Engaged Workplaces in 2023 award recognizing "forward-thinking employers for their unwavering commitment to employee engagement." SecurityScorecard is proud to be funded by world-class investors including Silver Lake Waterman, Moody's, Sequoia Capital, GV and Riverwood Capital. SecurityScorecard is hiring a Principal Software Architect to lead the system design of our agentic AI capabilities and serve as a technical anchor for engineering teams building the next generation of our platform. This is an individual contributor role reporting to the Chief Architect, alongside a Front-end Architect and a Data-focused Architect, and partnering closely with engineering leadership, Product, and Data Science. We're looking for someone who can go deep technically and also move a room: an architect whose designs get adopted because they're well-reasoned and well-communicated, not just handed down. You will lead the system design for how agentic features are built, integrated, and operated reliably at production scale, working in close partnership with our Data Science team, who bring the model and ML depth. Your focus is the system: orchestration, state and memory, tool boundaries, failure semantics, and how all of it composes with the wider platform. Like the rest of our architecture function, you'll prototype to prove out decisions rather than implement full solutions, and you'll set direction through Technical Design Reviews (TDRs), and standards. Deep data-engineering specialization isn't required, but you should be comfortable reasoning about data flows, storage decisions, and how agentic systems consume and act on data. What You'll Do Own the system design for our agentic capabilities: orchestration, context and state, tool boundaries, and reliability patterns for non-deterministic systems Write the TDRs, design docs, and standards that set architectural direction for agentic work across teams Prototype to validate architectural decisions before teams commit to them at scale Partner with Data Science so that agent and model work composes cleanly with existing platform services, from APIs and event streaming through to storage Review TDRs from across engineering, giving teams substantive feedback on architecture and risk, not only on AI work Build consensus across engineering teams and get them genuinely aligned, not merely compliant Help drive the shift to AI-assisted and agentic development across engineering, shaping how engineers design, review, and iterate in an AI-native workflow Mentor senior and staff engineers on agentic system design and measurably elevate the technical bar Communicate architectural decisions and their trade-offs clearly to executives and customers Required Qualifications: 10+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time as a senior, staff, or principal-level architect or technical lead designing production systems Deep expertise in distributed systems: service boundaries, consistency models, event-driven architecture, API design (REST; gRPC familiarity a plus), and operating systems reliably at scale Hands-on experience building, prototyping, and architecting agentic or LLM-powered systems in production, not just demos: agent loop design, context engineering, MCP and tool/function-calling integration, RAG architectures, memory and state management, and reliability and guardrail patterns for non-deterministic systems Working knowledge of data engineering fundamentals, including data modeling, pipeline design, and streaming vs. batch, sufficient to make informed architectural calls without deep specialization in the domain A track record of influence without authority: presenting a technical direction to skeptical engineers and earning genuine buy-in, and giving rigorous design review feedback on systems you didn't build yourself Strong technical writing and mentorship: TDRs, design docs, and decision records that teams can act on without hand-holding, plus a history of raising the technical bar around you Ability to communicate complex architectural decisions clearly to executives and customers Comfort operating as a senior individual contributor, driving outcomes through prototyping and technical credibility Preferred Qualifications: Familiarity with multi-agent orchestration patterns (supervisor and sub-agent architectures, agent handoffs), which our use cases are likely to grow toward Experience with our stack or comparable technologies: Node.js/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Kafka, AWS, Kubernetes Experience leading AI-assisted or agentic development adoption across an engineering organization; given the scope of this work at SecurityScorecard, this carries significant weight Experience partnering closely with data science or ML teams on productionizing their work Cybersecurity industry background Our Tech Stack Our platform runs on Node.js and TypeScript, with a React Microfrontend Architecture and PostgreSQL and ClickHouse for storage. We use Kafka for event streaming, and our infrastructure runs on AWS with Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, and ArgoCD. We are actively expanding our AI/ML infrastructure. You do not need to have used every tool here, but you should be comfortable reasoning across a stack of this kind and making principled architectural trade-offs within it. Benefits: Specific to each country, we offer a competitive salary, stock options, Health benefits, and unlimited PTO, parental leave, tuition reimbursements, and much more! The estimated total compensation range for this position is $240,000 - $300,000 (base plus bonus). Actual compensation for the position is based on a variety of factors, including, but not limited to affordability, skills, qualifications and experience, and may vary from the range. In addition to base salary, employees may also be eligible for annual performance-based incentive compensation awards and equity, among other company benefits. SecurityScorecard is committed to Equal Employment Opportunity and embraces diversity. We believe that our team is strengthened through hiring and retaining employees with diverse backgrounds, skill sets, ideas, and perspectives. We make hiring decisions based on merit and do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex or gender (including pregnancy) gender identity or expression (including transgender status), sexual orientation, age, marital, veteran, disability status or any other protected category in accordance with applicable law. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, in accordance with applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities in our job application procedures. If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability, please contact View email address on click.appcast.io. Any information you submit to SecurityScorecard as part of your application will be processed in accordance with the Company's privacy policy and applicable law. SecurityScorecard does not accept unsolicited resumes from employment agencies. Please note that we do not provide immigration sponsorship for this position. #LI-DNI SecurityScorecard