Job DescriptionThe Chief Architect - AI Platform & Enterprise Architecture is the senior architecture leader accountable for defining, governing, and evolving the enterprise AI technology architecture that enables scalable, secure, and responsible AI adoption across the organization.
This role sets architectural vision, establishes enterprise standards and guardrails, and drives alignment across platform, data, engineering, security, risk, and product teams. The Chief Architect ensures technology decisions advance business strategy, reduce duplication, improve resilience, and accelerate delivery of production-ready AI/ML capabilities.
Key Responsibilities- Define and maintain the enterprise architecture vision, principles, reference architectures, and decision frameworks for AI/ML platforms and adjacent technology domains.
- Establish architecture standards that promote reuse, interoperability, resiliency, security, and speed-to-market across products, platforms, and shared services.
- Drive architecture convergence across teams to reduce fragmentation, duplicate capabilities, technical debt, and long-term operational cost.
- Partner with senior technology and business leaders to ensure architecture roadmaps directly support strategic priorities and measurable business outcomes.
- Own the end-to-end architectural direction for enterprise AI/ML platform capabilities, including model integration, inference services, retrieval patterns, orchestration, and automation.
- Define production-grade patterns for observability, scalability, model/data traceability, policy enforcement, and responsible AI controls.
- Ensure platform capabilities can support secure onboarding of AI/ML use cases across DEV, UAT, and PROD environments with clear guardrails and repeatable patterns.
- Guide platform investment decisions by balancing innovation, risk, cost, operational complexity, and business value.
- Lead enterprise architecture strategy across hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems, including Azure, AWS, on-premises services, data platforms, integration layers, and shared platform capabilities.
- Define architectural patterns for secure data access, service integration, API management, event-driven flows, workload placement, and cost-aware scaling.
- Assess technology options and vendor/platform choices, making recommendations that balance enterprise standards, delivery velocity, security posture, and total cost of ownership.
- Ensure solution architectures align to enterprise security, compliance, resiliency, performance, and operational support requirements.
- Lead the architecture community of practice, establishing forums, review mechanisms, and decision processes that improve consistency without slowing delivery.
- Provide senior technical stewardship across domains, resolving complex cross-platform dependencies and ensuring end-to-end solution integrity.
- Coach and mentor architects, senior engineers, and technical leaders to raise architectural maturity and systems-thinking capability across the organization.
- Represent architecture in executive, risk, compliance, product, and engineering governance forums.
- Define architecture guardrails for security, privacy, compliance, data protection, model governance, auditability, and responsible AI.
- Identify and manage architectural risk across platforms, integrations, dependencies, and production operations.
- Ensure risk decisions are clearly documented, communicated, and aligned with enterprise control expectations.
- Translate complex architecture choices into clear executive-level recommendations, tradeoffs, risk implications, and investment options.
- Influence senior stakeholders across business, product, technology, security, and operations to align on enterprise architecture priorities and roadmap sequencing.
- Serve as a trusted advisor to technology leadership on platform strategy, modernization, vendor decisions, emerging technologies, and long-term capability planning.
- Drive alignment between architecture strategy, portfolio funding, delivery execution, and measurable business outcomes.
- Establish architecture-led operating mechanisms that improve transparency, dependency management, delivery predictability, and production readiness.
- Partner with engineering and platform leaders to ensure architectural decisions are reflected in backlogs, roadmaps, delivery plans, and operational support models.
- Promote disciplined use of Agile practices, Jira hygiene, architecture decision records, structured status reporting, and issue escalation paths.
- Hold teams accountable for solution quality, resiliency, performance, lifecycle ownership, and timely resolution of architectural risks.
Basic Qualifications - Bachelor's degree, or equivalent work experience
- 10 or more years of relevant software engineering experience
- Six or more years of experience leading multiple software engineering teams
Preferred Skills- Extensive experience leading enterprise architecture, platform architecture, or large-scale technology transformation in complex organizations.
- Proven ability to set architectural vision, define standards, govern technical decisions, and influence executive-level strategy.
- Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, data platforms, API/service integration, security architecture, and production operations.
- Strong understanding of AI/ML platform architecture, model integration patterns, responsible AI considerations, and data-driven systems.
- Demonstrated success leading across engineering, product, data, security, risk, compliance, and operations teams without relying solely on direct authority.
- Excellent executive communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical tradeoffs, risks, and investment choices clearly.
- Experience establishing or maturing an enterprise architecture function, architecture review board, or architecture community of practice.
- Experience with regulated, data-sensitive, or highly governed environments.
- Familiarity with architecture frameworks, decision records, technology road mapping, portfolio governance, and technical debt management.
- Experience shaping enterprise AI, GenAI, agentic AI, RAG, or intelligent automation strategies.
- Relevant architecture or cloud certifications such as TOGAF, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, or equivalent experience.
Location Expectations - This role requires working from a U.S. Bank location three (3) or more days per week
Benefits:Our approach to benefits and total rewards considers our team members' whole selves and what may be needed to thrive in and outside work. That's why our benefits are designed to help you and your family boost your health, protect your financial security and give you peace of mind. Our benefits include the following:
- Healthcare (medical, dental, vision)
- Basic term and optional term life insurance
- Short-term and long-term disability
- Pregnancy disability and parental leave
- 401(k) and employer-funded retirement plan
- Paid vacation (from two to five weeks depending on salary grade and tenure)
- Up to 11 paid holiday opportunities
- Adoption assistance
- Sick and Safe Leave accruals of one hour for every 30 worked, up to 80 hours per calendar year unless otherwise provided by law
Review our full benefits available by employment status here.
The salary range reflects figures based on the primary location, which is listed first. The actual range for the role may differ based on the location of the role. In addition to salary, U.S. Bank offers a comprehensive benefits package, including incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase 401(k) contribution and pension (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). Pay Range: $181,730.00 - $213,800.00
