Consulting Principal - AI Architecture and Engineering Lead

About Cognizant Consulting

Cognizant Consulting is more than Cognizant's consulting practice - we're a global community of 5,000+ experts dedicated to helping clients reimagine their business. Blending our deep industry and technology advisory capability, we create innovative business solutions for Fortune 500 clients. And now, we're looking for our next colleague who'll join us in shaping the future of business. Could it be you?

About the role

As an Associate Director, AI Architecture and Engineering Lead, you will make an impact by translating business priorities into secure, scalable, production-grade AI platforms and customer-facing solutions. You will be a valued member of the consulting team and work collaboratively with product, data, cloud, security, risk, legal, business leaders, engineering teams, and clients.

In this role, you will:

• Define and govern target architectures, reference patterns, reusable services, and engineering standards for enterprise AI, generative AI, retrieval-augmented generation, agentic applications, and AI-enabled digital products.
• Lead solutions from discovery and architecture through implementation, evaluation, deployment, and production operations, while remaining hands-on in design reviews, prototyping, troubleshooting, and critical technical decisions.
• Architect model-agnostic AI solutions using frontier and open models, stateful agents, multi-agent workflows, tool calling, memory, human approvals, Model Context Protocol, vector or graph retrieval, and secure enterprise integrations.
• Establish AI platform and LLMOps practices covering prompt and model versioning, automated evaluation, CI/CD, observability, rollback, incident response, latency, reliability, cost optimization, and responsible-AI controls.
• Lead, mentor, and develop architects and engineers while partnering with cross-functional leaders to prioritize use cases, assess vendors, strengthen engineering quality, and deliver measurable outcomes.

Work model

We believe hybrid work is the way forward as we strive to provide flexibility wherever possible. Based on this role's business requirements, this is a hybrid position requiring 3 days a week in a client or Cognizant office in Atlanta, Georgia. Regardless of your working arrangement, we are here to support a healthy work-life balance through our various wellbeing programs.

The working arrangements for this role are accurate as of the date of posting. This may change based on the project you're engaged in, as well as business and client requirements. Rest assured, we will always be clear about role expectations.

What you must have to be considered

• 12+ years of software, platform, data, or cloud engineering experience, including 5+ years in architecture or technical leadership, with demonstrated delivery of enterprise-scale production AI systems.
• Hands-on expertise in LLM application engineering, agents, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation, guardrails, distributed systems, cloud architecture, and multiple model providers.
• Experience establishing secure, reliable AI platform and LLMOps practices, including CI/CD, observability, automated evaluation, incident response, privacy, security, governance, resilience, and cost optimization.
• Experience guiding modern full-stack and distributed-system engineering using Angular and TypeScript, C# and .NET, APIs and events, PostgreSQL or AlloyDB, Redis, vector or graph stores, containers, and Google Cloud services.
• Strong executive communication, client-facing leadership, cross-functional collaboration, mentoring, and technical decision-making skills.

These will help you succeed

• Experience with LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, LangChain, LlamaIndex, GraphRAG, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience applying AI-native and specification-driven engineering practices, including coding agents, automated testing, security checks, validation gates, architecture decisions, and requirement-to-code traceability.
• Ability to assess emerging AI technologies and vendors, manage technical and business tradeoffs, and connect architecture decisions to measurable outcomes.
• Ability to build engineering standards, lead design and code reviews, and develop communities of practice.
• Experience operating in complex consulting or enterprise environments with accountability for delivery quality, reliability, security, and cost.

We're excited to meet people who share our mission and can make an impact in a variety of ways. Don't hesitate to apply, even if you only meet the minimum requirements listed.

Compensation

$122,400 - $223,500

This position is eligible for Cognizant's discretionary annual incentive program, based on performance and subject to the terms of Cognizant's applicable plans.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• 401(k) plan and contributions
• Employee stock purchase plan
• Employee assistance program
• 10 paid holidays plus PTO
• Paid parental leave and fertility assistance
• Learning and development certifications and programs