Senior Principal Architect - Agentic AI & Digital Platforms (FDE - Forward Deployment Engineer)

Senior Principal Architect - Agentic AI & Digital Platforms

Role Overview

A hands-on techno-functional architecture role - not research, not purely strategic. The Senior Principal Architect serves as the onshore technical anchor for an Agentic AI initiative across customer-facing digital platforms: translating business intent into scalable, governed, production-ready systems and holding the architectural line across delivery teams. The right person codes, reviews, and debates trade-offs in the same week they brief a VP.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and govern end-to-end agentic architecture for digital experiences spanning apps, loyalty, payments, and commerce workflows.
• Architect multi-agent orchestration patterns - orchestrator/subagent hierarchies, tool/function calling, stateful graph-based workflows, and agent memory (short-term, session, long-term).
• Establish MCP (Model Context Protocol) standards for governed tool and enterprise service exposure.
• Define runtime guardrails: spend controls, fraud detection hooks, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and auditability trails.
• Lead AI agent integration with retail systems - catalog, inventory, pricing, promotions, loyalty, and checkout.
• Set LLMOps standards: prompt versioning, RAG pipeline governance, evaluation harnesses, and observability (latency, token cost, drift, safety).
• Serve as the primary technical interface between business leaders, delivery teams, and platform partners.

Required Qualifications:

Foundational

• 12–18 years in enterprise/platform architecture; 3–4+ years delivering AI/ML or GenAI systems in production.
• Strong command of API-first design, distributed systems, event-driven architecture, and real-time data.Expertise in building and scaling applications.

Agentic AI - Core Requirement

• Production experience with LLM-based agent systems - shipped, not just prototyped.
• Hands-on with agent frameworks: LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, or AutoGen - and judgment on agentic architectural patterns
• Working knowledge of: ReAct/plan-execute patterns, multi-agent handoffs, RAG pipeline design (chunking, hybrid retrieval, reranking), context/prompt engineering, and MCP.
• Familiarity with agent failure modes - hallucination, tool misuse, cost runaway, infinite loops - and how to architect against them.
• LLMOps exposure: evaluation frameworks, observability tooling (LangSmith, Langfuse, or equivalent), prompt/model lifecycle management.

Retail / Consumer Domain

• Meaningful exposure to retail commerce systems: catalog, pricing, promotions, loyalty, checkout, or payments. Direct retail experience strongly preferred; adjacent commerce background considered.

Data & Integration

• Comfortable with event-driven architectures (Kafka or equivalent) and enterprise data quality realities.
• Familiarity with semantic models or knowledge graphs as agent grounding layers is a plus.

Leadership Profile

• Translates agentic AI concepts into business value language credibly at the executive level.
• Sets architectural boundaries, makes trade-off calls, and defends them under pressure.
• Experienced leading across onshore/offshore delivery models.
• Hands-on enough to write reference implementations and lead code reviews - Python proficiency expected.
• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving technology space with evolving standards.