Senior AI Architect (80-100%)

Description

At Vontobel, AI is moving beyond pilots. We are building production-grade, regulated, and scalable AI systems — and we are looking for the architecture leader who sets the technical direction behind them. As Senior AI Architect, you own the AI architecture across the firm: from LLM- and agent-based solutions to the enterprise platforms, guardrails, and standards that make them work in production.

Responsibilities

• Define, own, and continuously evolve the enterprise AI architecture and lead hands-on delivery of production-grade AI solutions end-to-end.
• Design and build LLM- and agent-based AI systems
• Establish and apply hands-on best practices for LLM and RAG architectures
• Architect scalable, secure, and resilient AI platforms, leveraging distributed and event-driven architectures
• Act as a hands-on architecture leader, mentoring senior engineers, leading architecture and design reviews, and delivering production-ready prototypes and reference implementations.
• Work closely with Product, Security, Risk, Legal/Compliance, and IT, ensuring AI solutions meet regulatory, governance, and model-risk requirements, while leading the AI Developer Guild to raise engineering standards and capability across the organization.

Qualifications

• A hands-on senior AI architecture leader, not a purely strategic person with deep engineering experience (8+ years in software engineering), including several years in architecture or technical leadership roles delivering production-grade AI / LLM solutions.
• Strong backend and systems engineering expertise, with deep hands-on experience in Python and modern API/service development
• Practical experience engineering LLM-powered applications, including LLMs, RAG, and agent-based patterns
• Solid MLOps and AI platform engineering background, covering model and prompt lifecycle management, offline and online evaluation, drift detection, reproducibility, and auditability of AI systems.
• Proven DevOps and cloud architecture experience, including CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, container platforms (Kubernetes/OpenShift), observability, and secure cloud-native architectures (preferably Azure).
• Comfort working in regulated, enterprise environments, balancing speed, quality, and risk while collaborating closely with Security, Risk, Compliance, and IT stakeholders.
• A pragmatic, communicative leader and mentor, comfortable owning decisions, navigating ambiguity, influencing multiple teams, and continuously raising the technical bar; fluent in English, with German as a strong plus.

Benefits

• Top Zurich location with collaboration spaces and free lunch.
• All the latest technology to help you excel and advance.
• Agile environment in how we think, the way we work and our trust for each other.
• Flat hierarchy with collaboration at all levels.
• Campus feeling and a collaborative spirit.