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About This Role
Job Title: AI Architect
Duration: 6\-month contract to hire
Location: Blue Ash, OH 45242 (I'm open to relocation candidates from EST, CST but they should be genuinely open to it)
Top 3 skills: software developer cloud architect, and AI capabilities
Project details:
Team details in. size, dynamics, locations: combo of full time and contractors, this has very broad exposure in terms of visibility, looking for 6\-month CTH
Project person will be supporting: Agentic platform
Top 3 skills: software developer cloud architect, and AI capabilities
SUMMARY
The AI Enablement team at Kroger/84\.51° is seeking an AI Architect – Agentic Platforms to define the architectural foundations that power Kroger’s enterprise agent ecosystem. This role is responsible for designing and governing the architecture for agent\-based integrations, agent registries, scoring/evals infrastructure, grounding patterns, and multi\-agent orchestration platforms. The AI Architect or Engineer provides deep technical leadership across engineering, product, data science, security, and cloud teams to ensure that agents are built safely, consistently, and with enterprise\-grade reliability, performance, and observability. This role combines expertise in large\-scale AI systems, distributed cloud architecture, and modern agentic frameworks.
Key Responsibilities
- Define and maintain the enterprise reference architecture for agentic platforms (agentic framework, tools, MCP, registries, evals, orchestration, grounding, observability).
- Establish architectural standards and best practices for agent design, tool integration, safety, telemetry, versioning, and lifecycle management.
- Provide architectural leadership for agentic platform engineering teams, ensuring scalability, resiliency, performance, and operability.
- Design and guide integration with semantic layers, embeddings, vector search, knowledge models, and enterprise data products to enable grounded agent behavior.
- Drive architectural direction for low\-code/no\-code agent\-building platforms, ensuring governance, consistency, and ease of adoption.
- Partner with cloud, security, product, and enterprise architecture teams to align agentic platform designs with Kroger’s AI governance and RAI principles.
- Define and support agentic SDLC through patterns for evals, safety tests, regression gates, monitoring, and benchmarking.
- Evaluate new agentic frameworks, open\-source standards, and orchestration tools to guide build vs buy platform decisions.
- Provide hands\-on architectural guidance across engineering and data science teams, enabling scalable, secure, and cost\-efficient agent deployment.
- Translate complex business needs into clear technical design patterns and platform capabilities that accelerate agent development.
Qualifications:
- Experience defining and governing enterprise architecture standards, patterns, and reference architectures.
- Deep understanding of MCP servers, tool calling, registries, eval pipelines, agent observability, and multi\-agent orchestration.
- Hands\-on experience with Azure and GCP, including Kubernetes, containerization, identity, networking, CI/CD, and API platforms.
- Familiarity with AIOps/MLOps stacks (MLflow, model registries, vector DBs, semantic layers, feature stores, monitoring).
- Experience in cloud and distributed systems architecture focused on scalability, reliability, observability, and performance.
- Designing enterprise AI/ML systems; 1\+ years hands\-on with GenAI, agentic workflows, RAG, LLM\-based integrations, or multi\-agent systems.
- Strong expertise with agentic frameworks and tooling (MCP, LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, autogen, Crewai, Agent SDK, OpenAI SDK, etc.).
- Hands\-on experience in modern software development and engineering practices.
- Proven experience integrating APIs and enterprise systems into agentic platforms and workflows.
- Ability to rapidly build AI\-driven prototypes, proofs of concept, and demo\-ready product experiences.
Job Type: Temp\-to\-hire
Pay: $65\.00 \- $70\.00 per hour
Work Location: In person
Salary Context
This $135K-$145K range is in the lower quartile for AI Architect roles in our dataset (median: $225K across 99 roles with salary data).
Role Details
About This Role
This role sits at the intersection of AI and engineering, building systems that bring machine learning capabilities into production environments. The scope varies by company, but the common thread is applying AI technology to solve real business problems at scale. Most AI roles today require a combination of software engineering fundamentals and domain-specific ML knowledge, with the exact mix depending on the team's maturity and the product they're building.
The AI job market is evolving fast. New role categories emerge as companies figure out what they need to ship AI-powered products. What matters most is the ability to learn quickly, build working systems, and iterate based on real-world performance data. The specific title matters less than the skills you bring and the problems you can solve. Companies are past the experimentation phase and want engineers who can deliver production-quality systems that work reliably at scale.
Across the 26,159 AI roles we're tracking, AI Architect positions make up 1% of the market. At ABCO COMPUTERS PVT LTD, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI hiring keeps growing across industries. Companies in tech, finance, healthcare, and retail are all building AI teams. The strongest demand is for people who can bridge the gap between AI research and production engineering. The shift toward generative AI has created new role types (LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer, AI Agent Developer) that didn't exist three years ago, while traditional roles (Data Scientist, ML Engineer) have evolved to incorporate LLM capabilities.
What the Work Looks Like
Day-to-day work involves a mix of building, debugging, and collaborating. You'll write code, review pull requests, participate in design discussions, and work with cross-functional teams (product, design, data) to define what AI features should do and how they should behave. Expect to spend time on both technical implementation and communication. Most AI teams operate in two-week sprint cycles, with regular demos and retrospectives. The ratio of heads-down coding to meetings and reviews varies by seniority, with senior roles spending more time on architecture decisions and mentorship.
AI hiring keeps growing across industries. Companies in tech, finance, healthcare, and retail are all building AI teams. The strongest demand is for people who can bridge the gap between AI research and production engineering. The shift toward generative AI has created new role types (LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer, AI Agent Developer) that didn't exist three years ago, while traditional roles (Data Scientist, ML Engineer) have evolved to incorporate LLM capabilities.
Skills Required
Python and cloud platform experience are common requirements. Specific skill needs vary by company and focus area, but familiarity with ML frameworks, data pipelines, and API design covers the basics for most roles. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), vector databases, and LLM API integration are increasingly standard requirements across role types.
Beyond the core stack, communication skills matter more than many technical candidates realize. The ability to explain AI capabilities and limitations to non-technical stakeholders is a differentiator at every level. Technical writing, documentation, and clear thinking about tradeoffs are underrated skills in AI roles. Experience with evaluation methodology (how to measure whether an AI system is working well) is becoming a core requirement, especially for roles that involve LLM integration.
Look for job postings that specify the problems you'll work on, the tech stack, and the team structure. Vague postings that list every AI buzzword are often a sign the company hasn't figured out what they need. Strong postings describe the product context, the team you'd join, and the specific challenges you'd tackle.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Architect roles pay a median of $292,900 based on 108 positions with disclosed compensation. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $131,300. This role's midpoint ($140K) sits 52% below the category median. Disclosed range: $135K to $145K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $76,880; Mid: $131,300; Senior: $227,400; Director: $244,288; VP: $234,620.
ABCO COMPUTERS PVT LTD AI Hiring
ABCO COMPUTERS PVT LTD has 1 open AI role right now. They're hiring across AI Architect. Based in Blue Ash, OH, US. Compensation range: $145K - $145K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 7% (1,863 positions) offer remote work, while 24,200 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: Los Angeles (1,695 roles, $178,000 median); New York (1,670 roles, $200,000 median); San Francisco (1,059 roles, $244,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI Architect roles include Software Engineer, Data Scientist, Data Analyst.
From here, career progression typically leads toward Senior Engineer, AI Architect, Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer.
Focus on building things that work. A deployed project that solves a real problem is worth more than any certification. Contribute to open-source, build portfolio projects, and invest in fundamentals (software engineering, statistics, systems design) rather than chasing the latest framework. The AI field moves fast, but the engineers who succeed long-term are the ones with strong fundamentals who can adapt to new tools and paradigms as they emerge.
What to Expect in Interviews
AI interviews typically combine coding challenges (Python-focused), system design questions tailored to the role, and discussions about your experience with relevant tools and frameworks. Strong candidates demonstrate both technical depth and the ability to make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs. Prepare portfolio projects that demonstrate end-to-end capability rather than isolated skills.
When evaluating opportunities: Look for job postings that specify the problems you'll work on, the tech stack, and the team structure. Vague postings that list every AI buzzword are often a sign the company hasn't figured out what they need. Strong postings describe the product context, the team you'd join, and the specific challenges you'd tackle.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 26,159 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 2,416 entry-level, 16,247 mid-level, 5,153 senior, and 2,343 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (1,863 positions). The remaining 24,200 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $184,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $309,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 28 roles); AI Architect ($292,900 median, 108 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 19 roles).
AI hiring keeps growing across industries. Companies in tech, finance, healthcare, and retail are all building AI teams. The strongest demand is for people who can bridge the gap between AI research and production engineering. The shift toward generative AI has created new role types (LLM Engineer, Prompt Engineer, AI Agent Developer) that didn't exist three years ago, while traditional roles (Data Scientist, ML Engineer) have evolved to incorporate LLM capabilities.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 26,159 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (23,752), AI Software Engineer (598), AI Product Manager (594). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (2,416) are outnumbered by mid-level (16,247) and senior (5,153) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 2,343 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (1,863 positions), with 24,200 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $184,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $309,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $122,200. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Rag (16,749 postings), Aws (8,932 postings), Rust (7,660 postings), Python (3,815 postings), Azure (2,678 postings), Gcp (2,247 postings), Prompt Engineering (1,469 postings), Openai (1,269 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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