About the jobThis position is critical to leveraging Twilio's massive data ecosystem and unmatched communication scale to build our customer facing AI capabilities, such as Twilio Conversational Memory, Enterprise Knowledge, Behavioral Data Intelligence and many more to power the future of our customer engagement platform.
As a Sr. AI Architect for Twilio Platform, you will also influence the design and evolution of our company-wide ML/AI Ops foundation. You will set the long-term technical vision, establish architectural guardrails, and ensure strict adherence to responsible AI principles. You will drive cross-organizational initiatives, solve complex technical challenges, and elevate the technical standards across all of Twilio. Transitioning AI/ML concepts from cutting-edge research to resilient, compliant, and cost-effective production systems will be your core mission.
As a Sr AI Architect, you will lead the company as the Distinguished Engineer and AI Contextual Engineering SME, serving as the guiding authority to our Architects, driving company-wide impact, and steering Twilio's overarching technical direction for conversational AI. In this pivotal leadership role, you will also influence the design and evolution of our company-wide ML/AI Ops foundation. You will set the long-term technical vision, establish architectural guardrails, and ensure strict adherence to responsible AI principles. By driving cross-organizational initiatives and solving complex technical challenges, you will elevate the technical standards across all of Twilio. Transitioning AI/ML concepts from cutting-edge research to resilient, compliant, and cost-effective production systems will be your core mission.
ResponsibilitiesIn this role, you'll:
- Define and drive a long-term AI/ML architectural vision that aligns with Twilio's business goals, specifically focusing on how data and memory power the next generation of customer engagement.
- Own the strategic roadmap for Twilio's ML/AI Ops platform and tooling, ensuring a unified approach to model development, deployment, and lifecycle management across all platform capabilities.
- Evaluate and implement modern LLM architectures, RAG systems, MCP/tooling frameworks, and inference optimization techniques.
- Lead architecture for agentic AI systems including orchestration, reasoning, tool usage, and contextual grounding.
- Stay current with rapidly evolving advancements in LLMs, agent frameworks, reasoning systems, and AI infrastructure.
- Transition seamlessly from high-level strategic communication with executives to deep-dive code reviews and pair programming with engineers.
- Partner closely with Product Management to turn a roadmap into a sequence of technical milestones, ensuring that technical investments always map to customer value.
- Have a 'player-coach' mentality, and contribute hands-on technical expertise while providing strategic direction and mentorship to the team.
Qualifications Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table!
Required:- 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 6+ years specifically focused on building and scaling production-grade ML systems at a platform level.
- Extensive experience with ML Ops and LLM Ops patterns, including designing and implementing rigorous evaluation metrics, automated retraining loops, and monitoring for non-deterministic AI features at scale.
- Deep expertise in the design, architecture, and deployment of production-grade ML/AI systems, including deep knowledge of transformer models, LLM orchestration, embedding models, inference optimization and vector stores.
- Deep understanding of the Context Engineering lifecycle, including semantic retrieval, contextual compression, state management across multi-turn conversations.
- Strong background in building cloud-based services using AWS, GCP, or Azure, with experience managing high-volume data and various data stores.
- Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with a proven ability to mentor engineers, influence company wide technical strategy, product direction, and drive results across the company.
- A Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, Statistics, or a closely related quantitative field.
Desired- A track record of relevant publications at top ML conferences or significant open-source contributions.
- Experience designing evaluation frameworks that specifically measure context quality
- Track record of designing and implementing enterprise-scale ML/AI Ops platforms
- Experience working in a geographically distributed environment.
LocationThis role will be
Travel We prioritize connection and opportunities to build relationships with our customers and each other. For this role, approximately 5% travel is anticipated to help you connect in-person in a meaningful way.
What We OfferWorking at Twilio offers many benefits, including competitive pay, generous time off, ample parental and wellness leave, healthcare, a retirement savings program, and much more. Offerings vary by location.
CompensationPlease note this role is open to candidates outside of California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Washington D.C., and Washington State. The information below is provided for candidates hired in those locations only.
The estimated pay ranges for this role are as follows:
- Based in Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont or Washington D.C. : $275,840.00 - 344,800.00.
- Based in New York, New Jersey, Washington State, or California (outside of the San Francisco Bay area): $292,080.00 - 365,100.00.
- Based in the San Francisco Bay area, California: $324,480.00 - 405,600.00.
- This role may be eligible to participate in Twilio's equity plan and corporate bonus plan. All roles are generally eligible for the following benefits: health care insurance, 401(k) retirement account, paid sick time, paid personal time off, paid parental leave.
The successful candidate's starting salary will be determined based on permissible, non-discriminatory factors such as skills, experience, and geographic location.
Application deadline information Applications for this role are intended to be accepted until August 30, 2026 but may change based on business needs.
