Chief AI Architect

Role Overview

The Chief AI Architect for Advice & Wealth Management shapes and evolves the AI architecture underpinning advice delivery, client experiences, operational efficiency, and decision intelligence. This role ensures generative AI capabilities are applied in a practical, business-focused way-balancing innovation with responsible AI practices, scalability, and operational excellence. Partnering closely with business, product, and engineering teams, the Chief AI Architect provides architectural leadership to define how AI is used across the portfolio, establishing patterns, guardrails, and platforms that enable sustainable adoption and measurable outcomes.

Key Accountabilities:

• Define and execute the AI architecture roadmap for Advice & Wealth Management in partnership and collaboration with other organizations.
• Align, lead and collaborate across organizational lines to move AI forward.
• Establish architecture patterns for generative AI powered applications including deployment and monitoring.
• Help business and product leaders understand how they can leverage AI to solve their business problems.
• Influence enterprise guardrails and standards for responsible AI usage (evaluation, observability, model performance, and risk management).
• Establish repeatable patterns for integrating AI into applications, workflows, and platforms.
• Partner with data architecture to ensure AI-ready data foundations (quality, governance, lineage).
• Guide teams on build vs. buy vs. partner decisions for AI capabilities and platforms.
• Research emerging AI technologies and patterns; translate into practical recommendations and investment proposals.
• Influence senior leadership on AI strategy, investment priorities, and sequencing.
• Coach and mentor architects and senior engineers in AI architecture and design practices.

Experience & Capabilities

• Deep expertise in agentic application architectures, model selection, fine tuning, prompt engineering, agentic loop design, context management, memory, MCP and tool calling a must.
• Proven ability to apply AI to real business use cases , moving solutions from concept to production.
• Experience designing AI systems that are secure, observable, and scalable .
• Strong understanding of model lifecycle management (training, deployment, monitoring, retraining).
• Experience establishing responsible AI governance and controls .
• Knowledge of AI/ML platforms, cloud-native patterns, and integration approaches (e.g. MCP, A2A, etc.).
• Ability to influence senior stakeholders and collaborate across business and technology.

What Success Looks Like

• AI capabilities are consistently applied to high-value business use cases across AWM.
• Clear, reusable AI architecture patterns adopted across teams.
• AI systems operate with strong observability, quality, and governance .
• Business leaders have confidence in AI-driven decision support and automation.
• AWM is positioned to scale both traditional AI and generative AI capabilities responsibly .

Major priorities for the role will include:

• Defining GenAI and agent-based architecture patterns (e.g., RAG, orchestration layers, evaluation frameworks).
• Establishing AI observability and monitoring practices across all solutions.
• Driving AI adoption in advice workflows (advisor assist, client engagement, operations automation).
• Creating clear guidance on when and how to use AI vs. traditional approaches .
• Partnering with Data Architecture to ensure AI-ready data foundations .
• Integrating AI capabilities across multiple Vanguard systems and third-party platforms .
• Partnering with Enterprise AI & Engineering Platforms organization to shape enterprise AI reference architecture and technology that supports AWMT AI priorities

Special Factors

Sponsorship
Vanguard is not offering visa sponsorship for this position.

About Vanguard

At Vanguard, we don't just have a mission-we're on a mission.

To work for the long-term financial wellbeing of our clients. To lead through product and services that transform our clients' lives. To learn and develop our skills as individuals and as a team. From Malvern to Melbourne, our mission drives us forward and inspires us to be our best.

How We Work

Vanguard has implemented a hybrid working model for the majority of our crew members, designed to capture the benefits of enhanced flexibility while enabling in-person learning, collaboration, and connection. We believe our mission-driven and highly collaborative culture is a critical enabler to support long-term client outcomes and enrich the employee experience.