Enterprise AI Architect

Enterprise AI Architect

About the project
An international client engagement building an enterprise AI capability. You will be the technical lead of a three-person team: yourself plus two Lead AI Solutions Engineers.

About the role
We are looking for an Enterprise AI Architect to own the technical shape of the entire AI capability on the engagement: standards, shared components, and the evaluation and release strategy. You will work directly with the client's leadership (CTO, enterprise architects, senior business stakeholders), select platforms and approaches, and defend those decisions in front of both technical and business audiences. This is a hands-on architecture role with a strong consulting and presales component. You write and review code and personally own the quality of what reaches users.

What you will do

Shape the work

• Work with senior business stakeholders and domain experts to define objectives, constraints and expected outcomes

• Identify which processes are worth automating and which are not, and say so plainly, including when the answer is no

• Select tools, platforms and approaches for each business problem and justify the choice to both technical and business leadership

• Shape and present solution proposals: scope, approach, effort, expected impact. Presales is part of the job

• Own outcomes with a product mindset: adoption, measurable time saved, and reliability for real users

Own the architecture

• Own the technical shape of the whole capability: standards, shared components, evaluation and release strategy, backwards compatibility

• Define what a well-formed skill looks like, what belongs in shared infrastructure, and what gets rejected in review

• Make and justify platform-level decisions: agent harnesses, integration architecture, build vs adopt

• Apply sound judgement on data handling, security and compliance when working with sensitive HR and compensation data

• Provide technical leadership to two engineers: review, direction, unblocking

Build it

• Design, build, test and maintain reusable AI skills: instructions, supporting scripts, validation logic, reference data, shared components

• Write and review production-quality code and own it through review, CI and release

• Build the evaluation layer: golden cases, acceptance criteria, regression checks

• Debug agent behaviour: establish why a workflow produced the wrong result and fix the root cause

• Integrate with the client's platforms and data sources

Drive it forward

• Run pilots with real users, collect structured feedback and ship improved versions

• Set and enforce standards for how skills are authored, reviewed, versioned and released

• Track where AI tooling is heading and bring relevant parts into the engagement before the client asks

What we expect

• Architect-level experience with proven ownership of real systems: module boundaries, reuse, versioning, integration, non-functional requirements

• Still hands-on: you write and review production code today. This is not a role for pure managers

• Strong engineering foundation in at least one modern stack. Our delivery stack is TypeScript / Node.js (NestJS, Angular); fluency is an advantage, not a requirement. Backgrounds in Python, Java or .NET are very welcome

• Solid engineering practice: version control, code review, automated testing, CI/CD

• Real LLM-backed systems shipped to real users, not just prototypes

• Broad hands-on knowledge of the current AI tooling landscape, not tied to a single vendor

• Working command of agentic patterns: tool use / function calling, MCP, prompt and context engineering, structured instruction design, orchestration

• Experience evaluating and improving non-deterministic systems with test sets and measurable acceptance criteria

• Judgement on where AI fits and where conventional software is the better answer

• Direct experience with external clients and senior business stakeholders, including CTO-level conversations

• Presales experience: shaping, scoping, estimating and pitching solutions to decision-makers

• Ability to explain a technical approach and its trade-offs to a non-technical audience

• Ability to turn ambiguous requirements and tacit domain knowledge into a clear design and an executable workflow, comfortable working without a full specification

• Product mindset: you optimise for user adoption and business outcome, not technical elegance

• English C1: you run client conversations unaided

• Sustained working-hours overlap with the client (US / Western Europe)

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with Claude Code, especially authoring Skills, plugins or MCP servers

• Experience with LLM evaluation tooling (promptfoo, LangSmith, custom harnesses)

• Consulting or professional services background

• Exposure to HR tech, compensation & benefits, payroll or workforce analytics

• Experience building internal developer tooling or standing up a platform capability

• Public work: open-source agent tooling, published skills or plugins, conference talks, technical writing on agentic engineering
  
  💼 What we offer

• Model: B2B contract with Bonapolia - one contract, one monthly invoice

• Rate: negotiated per candidate seniority and client budget

• Payment: monthly invoice, paid on the same schedule the client pays us (usually 30 days)

• Contract written under your country's law

• We handle the client-side paperwork: MSA, NDA, invoicing

🏢 About Bonapolia

Bonapolia is a family-owned IT staff augmentation team based in Lisbon. We build engineering teams for product companies and IT consultancies across Europe and the US.

More at bonapolia.com


📩 Ready to Join?
We look forward to receiving your application and welcoming you to our team!