BCG Platinion | Principal Architect - AI Platforms - Washington

BCG Platinion | Principal Architect - AI Platforms - Washington, United States of America

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Who We Are

Boston Consulting Group (BCG)is a global consulting firm that partners with leaders in business and society to tackle their most important challenges and capture their greatest opportunities. Our success depends on a spirit of deep collaboration and a global community of diverse individuals determined to make the world and each other better every day. 

BCG's Tech and Digital Advantage (TDA) practice focuses on helping clients deliver competitive advantage and superior business performance through the use of data, technology and digital. Platinion is the fastest growing practice at BCG and at the heart of the strategic impact we have with our clients. Our consultants and experts globally work across all industries and provide deep experience and expertise across a number of topics including Digital Transformation, Data & Digital Platforms, AI at Scale, Agile, Cybersecurity and Digitizing the Tech Function. 

At BCG, we bring together the right people to conquer complexity, drive material change, and initiate positive, long-term impact. Explore our  BCG Culture and Values for more information. 

About BCG Platinion

BCG Platinion's presence spans across the globe, with offices in Asia, Europe, and South and North America. We achieve digital excellence for clients with sustained solutions to the most complex and time-sensitive challenge. We guide clients into the future to push the status quo, overcome tech limitations, and enable our clients to go further in their digital journeys than what has ever been possible in the past. At BCG Platinion, we deliver business value through the innovative use of technology at a rapid pace. We roll up our sleeves to transform business, revolutionize approaches, satisfy customers, and change the game through Architecture, Cybersecurity, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Application and Risk functions. We balance vision with a pragmatic path to change transforming strategies into leading-edge tech platforms, at scale.

What You'll Do

Principal AI Platforms Architects at BCG Platinion are:

• Collaborative. They are interdisciplinary team players who seek alignment and establish relationships ranging from cross-functional stakeholder groups to existing teams.
• Systems thinkers. They are well-versed in designing sophisticated and robust AI solutions to common business problems.
• Technical experts. They are critical thinkers and have extensive Technology & AI expertise that drives novel solutions.
• Comfortable with ambiguity. They know the path forward isn't always well-defined. They are comfortable and confident working through the unknown.
• Change agents. They know how to make change happen across an organization. They can align and onboard teams to implement new processes and toolsets. They embrace complex challenges and guide an organization to optimize technology best practices.
• Agile advocates. They are well-versed in agile methodologies and use their expertise to strategically tackle difficult challenges and implement change.
• Innovative. They are creative thinkers who apply their deep technology architecture and AI Platform expertise to envision novel design patterns for the next generation of technology solutions.
• Knowledgeable. They have a sophisticated understanding of Technology Architecture and AI Platforms, acting as a viable resource on teams as both a hands-on practitioner and subject matter expert.
• Strategic partners. They work closely with senior client stakeholders, including C-level executives, to build hypothesis-driven solutions at the intersection of technology and business. They bridge the gap between IT and business functions, ensuring technology strategies are aligned with organizational goals to solve critical business challenges.

We are seeking a Principal AI Platforms Architect to design, guide, and evolve the architecture of next-generation intelligent agentic systems. This role bridges high-level system design with hands-on AI engineering - ideal for someone who can envision complex AI-enabled ecosystems while still being comfortable prototyping or coding to validate ideas. You’ll work across AI, data, product, and engineering teams to define scalable architectures for AI-driven applications, enabling the seamless integration of large language models (LLMs), data pipelines, and enterprise systems.

AI Architecture & Solution Design

• Define system architectures for AI and LLM-based solutions, ensuring scalability, low-latency inference, and modularity.
• Design Agentic AI solutions to optimize business workflow automation, including the use of memory, agentic reflection, and task planning.
• Design AI integration patterns, such as RAG, for model orchestration, context management, prompt orchestration, and external system connectivity.
• Establish architectural blueprints, design principles, and governance frameworks for model versioning, data lineage and responsible AI solutions across the organization.
• Architect polyglot model runtimes and hybrid pipelines (batch training + streaming inference) with attention to cost, latency, and risk.

Prototyping & Validation

• Develop minimal viable prototypes or proof-of-concepts to test model architectures, RAG flows, and agent orchestration.
• Evaluate emerging AI frameworks and tools (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, Strands, Google ADK, Semantic Kernel) for suitability and integration.
• Develop solutions using the latest agentic orchestration engines, such as n8n, Retool, OpenAI Agentkit, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and AWS Flows.

Implementation management and support

• Support restructuring IT processes and organization to adopt new systems.
• Oversee system performance, observability, and governance as solutions transition from prototype to production using tools such as LangSmith, Prometheus, Grafana, Evidently, WhyLogs, and OpenTelemetry.
• Optimize the application development processes - define standards for versioning, testing, and monitoring of models and AI services (LLMOps).

Communication and Collaboration

• Craft compelling narratives for Agentic reimagination of businesses, translating complex ideas for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Deliver impactful presentations, leading modules, presenting findings, and building consensus with clients.
• Build collaboration, mentor teams, and share knowledge to drive collective success - partner with product managers, data scientists, and engineers to translate business goals into robust AI system designs.
• Facilitate technical and strategic working sessions and workshops with both client and internal teams - provide technical direction and mentorship to engineering teams on architectural patterns, scalability, and best practices.
• Provide directions on key work items and feedback to other team members.

Team Management

• Manage junior team members by defining and organizing their "module", helping them structure their work and associated analyses.
• Mentor and coach junior team members by building mutual development agreements and manufacturing opportunities for them to grow and develop along explicitly defined objectives.
• Provide quality assurance oversight - Review junior team members’ output for overall correctness, level of insight, clarity, etc.
• Promote an overall positive experience for junior staff
• Serve as a role model by actively demonstrating and living BCG’s Culture and Values.

Innovation and Growth

• Stay ahead of the curve on new techniques in distributed AI systems, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), retrieval/indexing strategies, and agent frameworks.
• Drive innovation, uncovering novel ideas and transformative solutions.
• Serve as the subject matter expert on LLM integration, agentic system design, and intelligent automation frameworks.
• Foster a growth mindset, continuously learning and applying new skills to grow your impact.
• Support business development through technical proposals with clear AI/ML technology choices and roadmaps.
• Manage mid-to-senior level client relationships autonomously.
• Contribute to our thought leadership through written publications and speaking at events and conferences.

What You'll Bring

• Bachelor's degree in information technology, business administration, computer science, information systems, or system controls & engineering or a related field (Master’s degree is a plus).
• 10+ years of technology consulting or software engineering experience with more than 5+ years in architecture discipline.
• Strong foundation in software architecture and distributed systems design.
• Proven experience designing or scaling AI/ML or LLM-based applications.
• Proficiency in one or more programming languages: Python, JavaScript, TensorFlow, Keras, PyTorch, TypeScript, or Node.js.
• Familiarity with modern AI frameworks (LangChain, LangGraph, Google ADK, Strands, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, CrewAI, LlamaIndex).
• Understanding of Agentic AI capabilities and tools such as LangChain agents, AutoGen, multi-agent orchestration, RAG, memory modules, vector DBs, function-calling, observability, safety, deployment strategies and governance.
• Understanding of cloud architecture, data management, and API-based system integration
  
  • Cloud platforms: AWS (Bedrock, AgentCore), Microsoft (Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio), Google (Vertex AI, ADK, Agentspace).
  • Design and deployment of autonomous and semi-autonomous agents across multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
  • Integration of agent workflows with enterprise APIs, knowledge bases, and vectorized memory stores.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, Istio with GPU autoscaling for agentic runtime optimization.
• Experience with AI coding tools such as Cursor, Replit, Lovable, Claude code, Codex etc.
• Experience with vector databases, embeddings, context retrieval, and prompt orchestration patterns. Exposure to Pinecone, QDrant, Cosmos DB, Azure Search is a plus.
• Experience with knowledge graphs such as Neo4j and knowledge representation techniques is a plus.
• Exposure to Agentic memory engines such as mem0, Redis Memory, Postgres Memory is a plus.Outstanding ability to work creatively, autonomously, analytically, in a fast-paced problem-solving environment with a focus on customer and results.
• Superior technical knowledge, engineering rigor, and creative problem-solving.
• Ability to explain complex technology topics to senior executives.
• Ideally, experience with the below technologies:
  
  • Multi-agent systems, RAG, or knowledge graph integration.
  • MLOps / LLMOps pipelines, observability, and evaluation frameworks.
  • Frontend frameworks (React, Next.js) for intelligent app interfaces.
  • Consulting or innovation lab experience - comfortable with ambiguity and rapid iteration.
• An agile mindset that moves past blockers and a vision to iteratively migrate to the modern set of architecture capabilities with a lens of business benefits/value.
• Experience with the management of decision processes at large organizations.
• Strong customer and results orientation.
• Confidence and persuasiveness.
• Experience planning and managing large, complex projects.
• Willingness to travel to work with clients and BCG teams. At times, this role involves significant travel to client sites. The amount of travel will depend on client needs and nature of projects.

Additional info

What We Offer: 

At BCG, we care about our people, and offer best in class benefits to support you personally and professionally including: 

• An opportunity to work organically across disciplines and across BCG, we offer a unified and unrivaled opportunity that combines strategic thinking with hands-on applications. 
• A unique experience to work alongside a team of passionate and driven problem-solvers with a mission to deliver innovative and valuable digital solutions in a supportive environment.

FOR U.S. APPLICANTS:

The base compensation for this role is $230,000 in USD.

In addition to your base salary, you will also be eligible for an annual discretionary performance bonus and retirement contribution. BCG also provides a market leading benefits package described below.

At BCG, we are committed to offering a comprehensive benefit program that includes everything our employees and their families need to be well and live life to the fullest. We pay the full cost of medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees - and their eligible family members.* That’s zero dollars in premiums taken from employee paychecks. All our plans provide best in class coverage: 

• Zero dollar ($0) health insurance premiums for BCG employees, spouses, and children.
• $10 (USD) copays for trips to the doctor, urgent care visits and prescriptions for generic drugs. 
• Dental coverage, including up to $5,000 (USD) in orthodontia benefits.
• Vision insurance with coverage for both glasses and contact lenses annually. 
• Reimbursement for gym memberships and other fitness activities. 
• Fully vested retirement contributions made annually, whether you contribute or not. 
• Generous paid time off including vacation, holidays, and annual office closure between Christmas and New Years.
• Paid Parental Leave and other family benefits such as elective egg freezing, surrogacy, and adoption reimbursement. 

*Employees, spouses, and children are covered at no cost. Employees share in the cost of domestic partner coverage. 

To learn more about our employee benefit please check our  BCG Benefits page .

Boston Consulting Group is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, age, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity / expression, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected under national, provincial, or local law, where applicable, and those with criminal histories will be considered in a manner consistent with applicable state and local laws.
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