AI Architect

About the project

Join Neurons Lab as the AI Architect on a flagship engagement with a European private investment group — a holding company with a C-level executive team, an investment/portfolio function and an affiliated family office.

The programme builds one private, access-scoped context layer over the group's data — calls, email, Slack and messengers, board protocols, decks, portfolio updates — and then AI skills and agents that run on it : first for the executive team, then for every employee. Two loops sit on the same layer: alignment (strategy, OKRs and goal drift made visible) and efficiency (a process miner that reads real workflows from the digital footprint, then optimizer agents that ship the automations).

Four phases — Capture → Connect → Distill → Build — over roughly eight to ten two-week sprints , opening with a fixed-fee two-week Sprint 0 readiness pass (data-access audit, ontology spec, legal checklist across jurisdictions). A family-office workstream runs in parallel on the same squad.

This is deliberately not a wrapper around an off-the-shelf platform. The client wants infrastructure they own, deployed privately, with role-based access for people and full visibility for the AI. The same architecture becomes a NeuronsLab product line , so you are designing something that has to survive being redeployed for the next client.

Stage : pre-contract / design-partner negotiation. Duration : multi-phase, ~4–5 months to production for the executive pilot, with rollout beyond it.

Reporting : CTO (@Alex Honchar) and CEO are in the room at every key point — architecture, sprint planning, sprint reviews. You own the technical decisions between those points, working alongside an AI Analyst (1.0 FTE) and a Data Engineer (0.5 FTE), plus the client's Head of Security from day one.

This role is full-time.

What you'll actually do

• Run the Sprint 1 decision spike and write the decision record: one central private-cloud store vs. a semantic layer over the existing systems of record vs. ready platforms ( Gemini Enterprise , Glean-class, Cohere-class, open components) — scored on security, access control, speed, cost and reversibility.

• Design the ontology / semantic layer for the group: entities, relationships and business definitions spanning people, meetings, decisions, commitments, goals, deals, portfolio companies and documents.

• Architect the connector layer as an execution layer, not just an ingestion layer — MCP / tool-calling (Composio-class or built) so agents can act in HubSpot , mail, Slack and internal systems, not merely read a stream of data.

• Design role-scoped retrieval : the principle is that AI sees everything and people keep role-based access. Make that enforceable at the retrieval layer, not just in the UI, and evidence it to the client's security function.

• Architect the agent layer : per-executive skills (Chief of Staff / CIO / CFO / COO), the OKR & drift coach delivered in Slack, and the process miner → optimizer chain.

• Choose and stand up the private deployment — VPC / on-prem / managed, model selection and routing, cost and latency envelopes.

• Build the eval and observability harness : correctness, groundedness, access-boundary tests, regression suites before anything reaches an executive.

• Establish standards and failure-mode design — human-in-the-loop boundaries for agents that take real actions, audit trails, rollback.

• Stay hands-on: implement the critical pieces yourself, review the pod's work, and keep the build portable enough to redeploy as a NeuronsLab offering.

• Explain all of the above to a C-level audience in plain language , in review sessions and working groups.

Skills

• Agentic system architecture end to end: retrieval, tools, orchestration, memory, evals, guardrails

• Ontology / knowledge-graph engineering and semantic layers over heterogeneous sources (RDF/OWL, Neo4j , dbt-style modelling — pragmatism over purity)

• RAG / GraphRAG at production quality, including hybrid retrieval and permission-aware retrieval

• MCP, tool-calling and connector platforms ; designing agents that perform actions with side effects safely

• Private / sovereign deployment : VPC, on-prem, self-hosted or open-weight models; AWS and/or GCP data + AI stack

• Identity, access control and data governance applied to AI systems (RBAC/ABAC, scoping, audit)

• Strong hands-on Python ; comfortable writing the hard 20% of the code yourself

• Evals & observability for LLM systems; treating quality as measurable, not anecdotal

• Advanced written and spoken English ; can hold an architecture conversation with a CIO and a CISO in the same meeting

Knowledge

• The current enterprise context-layer landscape — Glean-class platforms, Cohere-class "AI OS" products, Microsoft Copilot / Agents, Gemini Enterprise , Palantir-style foundries — and where each genuinely differs

• GDPR and data-residency constraints for multi-jurisdiction European groups; what makes a private deployment defensible

• Financial services / private-equity context — investment policy, portfolio reporting, board process — a strong plus

• OKR / goal-management mechanics, enough to architect for them

Experience

• 7+ years hands-on AI/ML engineering, of which 2+ years building LLM / agentic systems in production

• 3+ years as technical lead or architect on client-facing delivery

• Demonstrated ontology / knowledge-graph or semantic-layer work over messy real-world enterprise data

• Experience with regulated or security-sensitive clients (BFSI, government, healthcare) and private deployment

• Experience in consulting or a services business — comfortable being the technical face to a C-level client

• Comfortable as the most senior technical person on a 2.5-FTE pod , with founders as sparring partners rather than a safety net