Principal Architect

People at Vectara are passionate about helping users take advantage of breakthroughs in applied AI to discover and learn more about their business and the world around them. Our team is a group of unquestionable all-stars in their respective fields of computer science and business. We are looking for a Principal Architect to join our Professional Services organization and serve as the technical lead for our most strategic customer engagements. In this role, you will be the Project Lead, owning the technical success of high-impact implementations. You will also be the Lead Architect, setting technical direction for complex, novel architectures as we push the boundaries of what AI can deliver for the enterprise. Finally, you will provide technical contributions, ranging from application development to evaluation and tuning, to documentation. Job Responsibilities As a Principal Architect, your work spans the entire post-sales lifecycle, focusing on high-level design, development, and optimization: Lead Architect & Design: Act as the primary architect for client solutions, assisting customers with complex architecture and design decisions for both cloud-based (SaaS, VPC) and on-premises AI systems. AI Application Development: Lead the hands-on design and development of AI solutions, including RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, and LLM-powered applications You will build production-grade systems that help our customers realize the business benefits of AI. Project Leadership: Serve as the technical lead for Professional Services engagements, coordinating between the customer’s technical staff and Vectara’s internal Product and Engineering teams to ensure delivery excellence. Evaluations & Tuning: Conduct deep evaluations and performance tuning of retrieval and agentic pipelines to ensure applications meet rigorous enterprise requirements. Strategic Advisory: Present sophisticated technical strategies to customer leadership, translating complex AI concepts into clear, impactful business value. Qualifications We are seeking a technical visionary who is "smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, curious". Experience: 10+ years of total experience, including 5+ years in software development and 5+ years in a senior technical-client-facing role within a Professional Services organization. Domain Expertise: Deep knowledge in AI, ML, search, RAG, LLMs, agentic AI, and/or data engineering. Development Proficiency: Expert-level proficiency with REST services and at least one major language: Python, JavaScript, or Java. DevOps Experience: Ability to work effectively within a modern CI/CD and DevOps environment. Infrastructure: Comprehensive understanding of cloud-based platforms (multi-tenancy, automation, fault tolerance) and on-premises infrastructure (GPUs, virtualization/k8s). Communication: Ability to communicate technical concepts and implementation approaches with clarity, purpose, empathy, and influence. Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering; a Master’s degree (MS) is highly preferred. Travel: Ability to travel up to 25% of the time for onsite work. Location requirements: We support remote applicants from all over the US but candidates based in the Bay Area are preferred. Vectara welcomes all. We value the collective wisdom of people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. Vectara has a positive and supportive culture—we look for people who are inventive and work to be a little better every single day. We seek to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, curious. After all, we are on a mission to find meaning. Perks and Benefits: 100% paid Medical, Dental, Vision for employees. Option of Health Savings Account (HSA) or Flexible Savings Account (FSA). Generous paid time off (PTO) plus paid sick time and holidays. Professional development and training opportunities. Company virtual happy hours and fun team building activities and more. Salary is just one component of Vectara’s employee compensation. Our full-time employees are also equity owners in the company, which although not an immediate cash component, can have positive impacts on long-term total compensation for each participating employee. We would be remiss if we didn’t highlight and celebrate our focus on engaging many of our employees in being economic co-owners of the business. Vectara welcomes all. We value the collective wisdom of people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities and perspectives. We never discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. Vectara has a positive and supportive culture—we look for people who are inventive and work to be a little better every single day. We seek to be smart, humble, hardworking and, above all, curious. After all, we are on a mission to find meaning.