Your Job

Koch Engineered Solutions (KES) is currently looking for an AI Architect to join our global Information Technology (IT) capability. The IT capability is a vital component of the KES strategy to improve business performance through the application of technology and to profitably transform our business. Our team operates with a startup mentality-working as an integrated group with the Engineering, Operations, Commercial, and Finance teams to design, build, and scale innovative solutions that transform KES work processes.

This position can sit in Houston, TX, Tulsa, OK, or Wichita, KS, and will have travel as required. This position is not eligible for VISA Sponsorship.

Our Team

An AI Architect engages with our IT and business teams to drive solution design for the organizations transformation initiatives and ensure that architecture best practices as part of design. You must show a proven ability to manage complex requirements while understanding the appropriate risk profile of a project to determine the correct solution. Daily challenges will arise that require more soft skill expertise than technical expertise - meaning, you cannot rely on technical aptitude alone to be successful. You must realize and show the ability to understand the business direction, objectives, and parties involved to get to the best outcome. A candidate who is contribution motivated and looks to be proactive will be a great fit for this opportunity.

What You Will Do
• Partner with Product and business teams to identify high-value AI and Generative AI use cases, then lead the technical solutioning process to build the detailed architecture for how AI will solve the problem.
• Consider the enterprise picture as part of AI solution design to produce reference architectures and patterns consistent with IT technical vision, data strategy, and responsible-AI standards
• Leverage expertise across multiple technical domains as part of the solutioning process (Machine Learning, GenAI/LLMs, Data Engineering, Security, Cloud Infrastructure, Application Integration, etc.)
• Lead the development and alignment of AI architecture strategy, patterns, and guardrails across the engineering & design organization.
• Experimentation - Identify, prototype, and evaluate emerging AI models, agentic frameworks, and tooling to solve problems new to the organization
• Establish and champion responsible AI practices - model governance, security, data privacy, evaluation, and ongoing monitoring of solutions in production
• Execute on initiatives as appropriate

Who You Are (Basic Qualifications)
• Experience designing and deploying AI/ML and Generative AI solutions on modern cloud platforms (Azure AI / Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock/SageMaker, Claude Code / Claude Cowork, or comparable)
• Working knowledge of core Generative AI building blocks - large language models, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings, and vector stores
• Proven experience communicating AI and technology concepts in both execution detail and broad terms to a variety of technical and business audiences
• Demonstrated capability partnering with customers to understand business and operating models and translate them into AI-enabled solution proposals
• 5+ years' experience in Information Technology, including hands-on delivery of data, analytics, or AI/ML solutions

What Will Put You Ahead
• Experience in supporting discrete engineering & manufacturing
• Experience designing and deploying agentic AI - conversational and action-oriented AI agent platforms - to solve business problems
• Deep understanding of Generative AI and large language model architecture (transformer models, fine-tuning, RAG, embeddings, and prompt/context engineering)
• Experience operationalizing AI - LLMOps/MLOps practices for model deployment, evaluation, prompt and version management, monitoring, and drift detection
• Experience with vector databases and retrieval systems (e.g., Azure AI Search, pgvector, Pinecone)
• Experience with AI orchestration and agent frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, or similar)
• Familiarity with Responsible AI and AI governance - safety, guardrails, bias mitigation, data privacy, and emerging regulatory requirements
• Experience with data architecture that supports AI (data lakes, graph/knowledge-graph technology, feature stores, and data pipelines)
• Technical experience with serverless and event-driven cloud services, microservices, and containers (e.g., Lambda/Azure Functions, SQS/SNS, EventBridge, API Gateway, Docker, Kubernetes, AKS/ECS)
• Experience with DevOps and MLOps methodologies and tools (CI/CD, GitHub, Azure DevOps)

At Koch companies, we are entrepreneurs. This means we openly challenge the status quo, find new ways to create value and get rewarded for our individual contributions. Any compensation range provided for a role is an estimate determined by available market data. The actual amount may be higher or lower than the range provided considering each candidate's knowledge, skills, abilities, and geographic location. If you have questions, please speak to your recruiter about the flexibility and detail of our compensation philosophy.

Hiring Philosophy

All Koch companies value diversity of thought, perspectives, aptitudes, experiences, and backgrounds. We are Military Ready and Second Chance employers. Learn more about our hiring philosophy here .

Our Benefits

Our goal is for each employee, and their families, to live fulfilling and healthy lives. We provide essential resources and support to build and maintain physical, financial, and emotional strength - focusing on overall wellbeing so you can focus on what matters most. Our benefits plan includes - medical, dental, vision, flexible spending and health savings accounts, life insurance, ADD, disability, retirement, paid vacation/time off, educational assistance, and may also include infertility assistance, paid parental leave and adoption assistance. Specific eligibility criteria is set by the applicable Summary Plan Description, policy or guideline and benefits may vary by geographic region. If you have questions on what benefits apply to you, please speak to your recruiter.

Additionally, everyone has individual work and personal needs. We seek to enable the best work environment that helps you and the business work together to produce superior results.