Distinguished AI Engineer

Distinguished AI Engineer

NTT DATA Services is seeking a Distinguished AI Engineer to join our team in Jersey City, New Jersey (US-NJ), United States (US). This role involves setting the architecture, engineering standards, platform strategy, and technical governance for enterprise AI and GenAI capabilities. The successful candidate will guide senior engineering teams and ensure that the AI infrastructure is scalable, reusable, observable, cost-efficient, secure, and compliant.

Role Purpose:

The Distinguished AI Engineer will own the cloud-agnostic AI blueprint while leveraging AWS as the current implementation platform. The role involves defining reusable Terraform/IaC and DevOps pipeline patterns that can be federated across multiple AI use cases. The candidate will ensure that the architecture supports AI for business, AI for engineering, and responsible citizen development without fragmenting controls.

Key Responsibilities:

• Define target-state enterprise AI architecture, LLM platforms, model hubs, AI gateways, RAG services, agent frameworks, orchestration layers, and model-serving infrastructure.
• Establish enterprise standards for AI SDLC, LLMOps, MLOps, evaluation, release management, operational resilience, and production support.
• Create AWS implementation patterns that align with a cloud-agnostic blueprint and minimize unnecessary vendor lock-in.
• Define standards for Terraform modules, reusable IaC templates, environment strategy, pipeline promotion, approvals, observability, secrets, rollback, and operational controls.
• Guide architecture for secure, scalable, and cost-efficient inference across cloud, hybrid, private, and containerized environments.
• Define guardrail patterns for hallucination mitigation, bias monitoring, harmful-content controls, prompt injection defense, data leakage prevention, and human oversight.
• Lead design reviews for critical AI systems and provide technical assurance to architecture, risk, security, and governance forums.
• Partner with cybersecurity, risk, compliance, legal, audit, product, business, and citizen-development enablement teams.
• Assess emerging AI technologies and recommend adoption based on business value, maturity, risk, cost, portability, and regulatory fit.

Must-Have Candidate Profile:

The ideal candidate will have 10+ years in AI/ML systems, distributed systems, enterprise architecture, or platform engineering. They should have deep experience with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, model serving, AI orchestration, evaluation frameworks, and AI infrastructure. The candidate must have a proven track record defining architecture and technical standards across multiple engineering teams. Strong AWS cloud architecture experience or comparable hyperscaler depth is required, with the clear ability to design cloud-agnostic AI platform patterns. Experience shaping Terraform/IaC standards, DevOps pipelines, secure deployment patterns, observability, resiliency, and platform operating models is also necessary. The candidate should be able to influence senior stakeholders and operate across business, technology, risk, compliance, security, data, and architecture forums.

Preferred Experience:

Global bank, fintech, financial-services, or regulated-enterprise platform experience is preferred. Experience with enterprise AI platforms, private LLM deployments, internal model hubs, AI gateways, multi-cloud AI strategy, or platform blueprint ownership is also desirable. Familiarity with Responsible AI, model risk management, audit expectations, technology risk controls, and citizen development governance is beneficial.

Compensation:

NTT DATA provides a reasonable range of compensation for U.S.-based positions. The starting pay range for this role will depend on the nature of the role offered and will either be [$139,872 - $209,808], or [$80-$100] if the role is hired as a temporary position. Actual compensation will depend on a number of factors, including the candidate's relevant experience, technical skills, and other qualifications. This position may also be eligible for incentive compensation based on individual and/or company performance. If the position offered in temporary, the position will not be eligible for incentive compensation. This position is eligible for company benefits that will depend on the nature of the role offered. Company benefits may include medical, dental, and vision insurance, flexible spending or health savings account, life and AD&D insurance, short and long term disability coverage, paid time off, employee assistance, participation in a 401k program with company match, and additional voluntary or legally-required benefits.

About NTT DATA:

NTT DATA is a $30 billion business and technology services leader, serving 75% of the Fortune Global 100. We are committed to accelerating client success and positively impacting society through responsible innovation. We are one of the world's leading AI and digital infrastructure providers, with unmatched capabilities in enterprise-scale AI, cloud, security, connectivity, data centers, and application services. Our consulting and industry solutions help organizations and society move confidently and sustainably into the digital future. As a Global Top Employer, we have experts in more than 50 countries. We also offer clients access to a robust ecosystem of innovation centers as well as established and start-up partners. NTT DATA is a part of NTT Group, which invests over $3 billion each year in R&D. Whenever possible, we hire locally to NTT DATA offices or client sites. This ensures we can provide timely and effective support tailored to each client's needs. While many positions offer remote or hybrid work options, these arrangements are subject to change based on client requirements. For employees near an NTT DATA office or client site, in-office attendance may be required for meetings or events, depending on business needs. At NTT DATA, we are committed to staying flexible and meeting the evolving needs of both our clients and employees.