Principal Platform & Engagement Architect

Why Join Exadel:

We’re an AI-first global tech company with 25+ years of engineering leadership, 2,000+ team members, and 500+ active projects powering Fortune 500 clients, including HBO, Microsoft, Google, and Starbucks. From AI platforms to digital transformation, we partner with enterprise leaders to build what’s next. What powers it all? Our people are ambitious, collaborative, and constantly evolving.

Project Duration: 6-month engagement with the possibility of extension

What You’ll Do:

• Lead structured technical discovery with the hardware and platform engineering teams to establish the API surface, platform readiness, and target workload definitions.
• Author the Architecture Decision Record (ADR) documenting the integration approach, technology choices, and key design decisions.
• Define the requirements baseline, functional and non-functional, and produce the risk register.
• Negotiate and agree the revised Statement of Work for Phases 1 and 2 with the client.
• Establish the reference workload definition and benchmark criteria to be used through the POC.
• Maintain technical governance and architectural coherence across the integration build.
• Direct the engineering team on component delivery: workload adapter, hardware dispatch client, telemetry bridge, and any required platform-side changes.
• Manage the client relationship on a day-to-day basis: progress reporting, risk escalation, and gate reviews.
• Review and sign off integration components before gate conditions are assessed.
• Lead knowledge transfer and runbook acceptance sessions with client engineering teams.
• Support the customer Proof of Value demonstration in an advisory capacity.

What You Bring:

• Demonstrable background in cloud platform architecture, distributed systems, and API design — REST and gRPC in particular.
• Experience integrating third-party hardware or specialised compute into cloud scheduling and resource management layers.
• Familiarity with workload orchestration: Kubernetes, custom schedulers, resource plugins, or equivalent.
• Working knowledge of observability tooling: OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or comparable stacks.
• Comfort operating across the full stack, from infrastructure (IaC, networking, cloud providers) to API and platform layers.
• SRE background or equivalent: SLO definition, telemetry design, incident response, and operational documentation.
• Ability to design for observability and failure modes from the outset, not as a post-build afterthought.
• Experience producing runbooks and operational documentation for technical handover.
• Proven ability to lead client-facing technical engagements, managing expectations, communicating risk, and maintaining trust in ambiguous early-stage programmes.
• Comfortable working with non-traditional technical counterparts, such as hardware scientists who may not be experienced platform API producers.
• Skilled at structured requirements elicitation under significant uncertainty — able to extract requirements through interviews, prototypes, and reference examples rather than documentation.
• Experience producing Architecture Decision Records, revised SOW documents, and risk registers as formal engagement outputs.
• Experience operating as a senior contractor or fractional leader, comfortable with part-time engagement structures and accountability for commercial gate conditions without full-time oversight.
• Able to take ownership of engagement quality and client confidence independently.

Nice to Have:

• Prior exposure to custom silicon, FPGA integration, or specialised AI accelerator hardware.
• Experience in sovereign cloud, data sovereignty, or regulated compute environments.
• Familiarity with AI/ML workload types: inference serving, training pipelines, batch processing.
• Experience with M2M identity, workload authentication, and platform governance patterns.
• Background in early-stage or venture-backed technology companies where engineering rigour and commercial pragmatism must coexist.

Legal & Hiring Information:

Exadel is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to inclusion across minority, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, age, and more. Reasonable accommodations are available to enable individuals with disabilities to perform essential functions. Please note: this job description is not exhaustive. Duties and responsibilities may evolve based on business needs.

Your Benefits at Exadel:

Exadel benefits vary by location and contract type. Your recruiter will fill you in on the details.

• International projects
• In-office, hybrid, or remote flexibility
• Medical healthcare
• Recognition program
• Ongoing learning & reimbursement
• Well-being program
• Team events & local benefits
• Sports compensation
• Referral bonuses
• Top-tier equipment provision

Exadel Culture:

We lead with trust, respect, and purpose. We believe in open dialogue, creative freedom, and mentorship that helps you grow, lead, and make a real difference. Ours is a culture where ideas are challenged, voices are heard, and your impact matters.

Key skills/competency:

• Principal Platform & Engagement Architect
• Cloud Platform Architecture
• Distributed Systems
• API Design (REST, gRPC)
• Workload Orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Observability Tooling (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
• Client-Facing Engagements
• Requirements Elicitation
• Architecture Decision Records (ADR)