Principal AI Architect

We are looking for a Principal AI Architect to own the design and build of Brightside’s AI agent platform. This is a senior, hands‑on role and you will work directly alongside the CTO and engineering team to architect and ship production systems, not design from a distance. The core system you will build: a real‑time agent layer that listens to live conversations between Financial Assistants and clients, understands what is happening turn by turn, surfaces intelligent coaching to the FA in under 2 seconds, and writes structured data back to the CRM. As the platform matures, this same agent layer will conduct client conversations autonomously.

What this role isn't...

A governance role. An advisory role. A research role. Or a people‑management role. It is an execution‑oriented architecture role. You will design it and help build it.

The meaningful work you will tackle:

• Design and own the multi‑agent orchestration layer - session supervisor, domain clusters, escalation arbiter, and conversation manager
• Define agent routing logic, context sharing, tool use, and latency budgets across 18+ agents
• Own the dual‑mode agent architecture: human‑assisted mode (agent coaches the FA) and autonomous mode (agent conducts the client conversation directly)

LLM Systems & Prompt Engineering Governance

• Define model selection and routing across low‑latency and reasoning‑intensive agent tiers
• Govern the prompt architecture: structured agent prompt standards, runtime domain knowledge injection, and conditional output formatting across delivery surfaces
• Build and own the eval harness - schema validation, behavioral regression testing, latency profiling
• Design the domain knowledge base structure across the full financial use case library - 8 domains, 49 use case types
• Own the data model underlying the AI platform: client financial profiles, cases, goals, options, outcomes, and financial impact measurement
• Architect the CRM sync layer - real‑time field writes after FA confirmation, human correction logging as training signal
• Define canonical data models across clients, employers, financial products, and outcomes
• Ensure data integrity across Aurora PostgreSQL (new CRM) and Aurora MySQL (existing platform)

AI Infrastructure & Platform

• Own the AWS Bedrock‑native inference infrastructure — async invocations, Knowledge Bases, RAG pipelines
• Design the session state layer: ElastiCache Redis for hot state, DynamoDB for durable session records
• Define AI governance standards: model evaluation, monitoring, explainability, and compliance in a regulated fintech environment
• Evaluate and guide decisions on model providers, orchestration frameworks, and platform tooling
• Serve as the CTO’s right‑hand technical partner on all AI and platform architecture decisions
• Work alongside the Engineering Lead and team as a co‑owner of the architecture - present in design, implementation, and debugging
• Translate business requirements from Client Services and Product into architecture‑aligned technical scope
• Lead prototyping and technical discovery to test assumptions and reduce uncertainty before committing investment

Executive & Cross‑Functional Partnership

• Partner closely with the CTO, Product leaders, Analytics, and Engineering to:
• Translate business strategy into technical direction
• Align data, AI, and platform investments
• Serve as a trusted technical advisor to executive leadership on data, AI, and platform tradeoffs

How You’ll Work

• Hands‑on and opinionated - you form views, explain them clearly, and update them when wrong
• Oriented toward production outcomes, not theoretical elegance
• Comfortable saying no to poor architectural decisions and explaining why
• Willing to be in the weeds - debugging a Bedrock invocation, profiling a latency spike, reviewing a schema change
• Balancing experimentation with rigor in a regulated fintech environment

What we’re looking for in your background & what makes you a success:

• 10+ years in software engineering or systems architecture, with significant hands‑on experience in the last 3 years
• Production experience building real‑time AI systems - specifically systems that operate on a per‑turn, sub‑second latency budget
• Hands‑on experience with Amazon Bedrock, AWS Lambda, and Kinesis — not just familiarity, but have hit their limits and worked around them
• Multi‑agent system design experience - orchestration patterns, agent handoff, context sharing, structured output validation
• Experience in a regulated environment (fintech, financial services, or healthcare) with an understanding of privacy and compliance requirements
• Comfortable operating in a small, fast‑moving team where you design and build - not just review and approve

What gives you a strong Advantage

• Experience building voice or conversation intelligence systems (contact center AI, real‑time transcription pipelines, live agent coaching tools)
• Hands‑on experience with Amazon Connect and Contact Lens
• Background in conversational AI product companies (Cresta, Observe.AI, Cogito, Replicant, or similar)
• Experience with LLM prompt engineering at a systems level - eval harnesses, versioned prompt governance, regression testing
• Prior experience as a lead architect at a Series B–D company where you were one of a small number of senior technical voices

Why Brightside:

For our clients - our mission is clear. To improve the financial health of working families. Brightside is an employee benefit with a brand‑new approach to personal finance. We offer unique solutions to help with anything related to finances, emotions and behaviors that can impact our clients. We take a holistic view to provide unbiased and confidential assistance through an unmatched blend of products, technology and true human care. Our goal is to make it easier for our clients to understand their options to obtain long‑term financial health and gain peace of mind when it comes to financial matters.

For our employees - we believe in inspiring careers, great life/work balance and meaningful work that truly makes a difference in the lives of working families. Your work will have direct impact on the lives of our clients. You will have the opportunity to see a growing start‑up from the inside out and see how passionate our employees are about the work we do and the outcomes we are creating for others.

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