Principal Software Architect (m/f/x) - Focus: AI Architecture

About us:
The appliedAI Initiative elevates Europe’s industry to become shapers in the age of AI, creating a future that we desire to live in. Through our ecosystem of strong partners, comprehensive programs, services and solutions we advance companies holistically on their AI journey. With our uniquely diverse, interdisciplinary, and driven team, we build on deep technical expertise while specializing on applicability of the solutions. We share a mindset of collaboration and openness with our ecosystem of leading companies and tech players. Our common goal is to strengthen the European landscape, jointly creating unique knowledge for applying trustworthy AI. We believe that AI Agents will be the dominant topic for AI in the near future and that appliedAI with its partner ecosystem will impact how this technology is being used in industry and beyond in Europe.

Your mission:
As a Principal Software Architect focused on AI Architecture in Professional Services, you define reference architectures, govern standards across programs, and lead high-impact transformations with enterprise clients. You combine strategic architecture with hands-on depth to deliver robust, scalable, and compliant AI systems at scale.
Your responsibilities will include:
• Define architectural vision and strategy for multi-team delivery of complex AI-enabled software systems, ensuring coherence, scalability, and technical excellence
• Lead discovery, design, and critical solutioning workshops, setting reference architectures, standards, templates, and best practices across engagements
• Architect LLM/ML platforms (serving, retrieval/RAG, evaluation, guardrails) and the MLOps backbone (registries, CI/CD, rollout/rollback). Engineer for SLOs/SLAs, resilience, security, and cost efficiency across cloud and on-prem deployments
• Set and enforce standards for architecture design, code quality, observability, security, data governance, and compliance—including EU AI Act implications
• Mentor and guide engineering teams and clients, providing technical leadership during spikes, de-risking activities, and key decision points
• Partner with sales and delivery leadership in pre-sales, scoping, estimations, proposals, and stakeholder alignment, representing technical vision to clients and business leaders

Your profile:
• 12+ years designing and operating large-scale, production-grade systems; 5+ years in consulting/professional services
• Proven experience technically leading large projects and customer engagements with measurable outcomes
• Expert-level software architecture fundamentals (distributed systems, data/messaging, API design) and cloud-native platforms (Docker/Kubernetes, Terraform/Pulumi, CI/CD)
• MLOps and LLM platform architecture (vLLM/Triton/ONNX; MLflow/W&B; monitoring/drift; evaluation frameworks; safety/guardrails)
• Security, privacy, and governance by design (SSO/IAM, secrets, audit logging, data residency/compliance; EU AI Act awareness)
• Exceptional communication and stakeholder management from engineering to C-level; strong documentation practices
• Fluent English, fluent German is a plus

What we offer:
• A highly qualified and motivated team of ~90 people on a journey to change the rapidly evolving European AI Landscape. 
• Experience the best of both worlds with our hybrid work model: You can choose to work from our vibrant offices - either at the IPAI in Heilbronn or the House of Communication in Munich - while also enjoying the flexibility to work remotely a few days each week
• Opportunity to shape a variety of projects and the development of new, original content based on the latest developments in AI and its adoption in businesses
• An atmosphere that encourages to think and experiment in new ways with software, hardware, and processes
• Hottest topics of the next decade and freedom and trust to initiate own activities
• A highly visible initiative that helps you build a large and high-level network of start-ups, partners, and tech companies
• Sports membership with Wellpass to access thousands of sports facilities all over Germany (and beyond)
• JobRad leasing option
• You can take a sabbatical of up to 3 months after 3 years of employment - because sometimes 30 vacation days are not enough to explore the beauty of this world.

Contact:
Lucas Fernandes - Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist
appliedAI Initiative GmbH, August-Everding-Str. 25, 81671 München