Principal Software Architect, Generative AI & Platform Engineering

📋 Description

• • As Principal Software Architect for Generative AI & Platform Engineering at Risepoint Holdings LLC, you will define the technical foundation for scaling AI-powered educational solutions across a growing platform serving over 100 universities and colleges. You will operate at the intersection of generative AI innovation and enterprise-grade platform reliability, making critical build-vs-buy decisions, shaping AI orchestration layers, and establishing architectural standards that ensure scalability, security, and responsible AI practices. You will partner with product, engineering, and data teams to translate student-centered outcomes into robust technical systems, while mentoring senior engineers and driving architectural excellence through ADRs, ARB leadership, and hands-on experimentation frameworks. This is a greenfield, remote-first role with org-wide influence from day one, where you will help Risepoint evolve into a tech-enabled higher education leader by grounding AI in real student impact—not just model performance.
• • You will own the AI platform layer, including model orchestration, prompt management, evaluation pipelines, and responsible AI guardrails, ensuring that AI systems improve over time through feedback loops and quality thresholds. You will design experimentation frameworks for prompt variants, model comparisons, and retrieval strategies, enabling teams to run controlled, confident AI experiments. You will stay current on the GenAI landscape, bringing relevant capabilities into Risepoint’s roadmap, and work with data and analytics teams to ensure AI is governed by reliable, ethical data practices. You will communicate architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, fostering alignment across product, engineering, and leadership teams.
• • You will lead architectural reviews via the Architecture Review Board (ARB), setting cadence, criteria, and culture for consistent, scalable design decisions. You will create and steward Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) to capture context, trade-offs, and rationale behind key choices, and identify and resolve architectural risk early with engineering leads. You will mentor senior engineers, address technical debt in AI systems, and contribute to hiring and growing the architecture practice at Risepoint. Your background in cloud-native architecture (AWS/GCP/Azure), LLMs, vector databases, RAG patterns, and modern data platforms will be essential, as will familiarity with data governance, consent management, and responsible AI principles. Experience in EdTech or multi-tenant SaaS at scale is preferred, as is familiarity with tools like Databricks or Optimizely for experimentation and platform evolution.