Azure Senior Architect

3Pillar

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Software Development 👥 1001 employees 📍 Fairfax, VA, US

At 3Pillar, we believe something truly incredible happens at the intersection of product engineering and cognitive computing. As the leading modern application strategy, design and engineering firm, …

Job Overview

3Pillar is an AI transformation partner on a mission to help enterprises build the AI-native products and intelligent agents that will define the next era of business. With teams across North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, we work with the most ambitious companies in financial services, healthcare, media, and technology — helping them move faster, modernize boldly, and compete on their own terms. Our HelixAI platform and Helix Pods delivery model put our engineers at the center of real agentic transformation — doing work that is open, portable, and built to last. We are building the future of enterprise AI.

🌟 Distinguished Tech Innovator:

3Pillar warmly extends an invitation for you to join an elite team of visionaries. Beyond software development, we are dedicated to engineering solutions that challenge conventional norms. Envision you: steering projects that redefine urban living, establish new media channels for enterprise companies, or drive innovation in healthcare. Your invaluable expertise will serve as the cornerstone in shaping the future direction of our endeavors.

This role is the foremost technical authority within a technology stack. The Senior Architect not only owns high-level design decisions and technical standards - they define the architectural vision that shapes how 3Pillar engineers build and how our clients compete. The ideal candidate is a strategic thinker and practitioner in equal measure, as comfortable advising executive stakeholders on technology investment as they are resolving the toughest architectural challenges on the ground.

Key Responsibilities

• Act as the emissary of the architecture.


• Define 3Pillar’s AI architecture vision and engineering standards, establishing the patterns and governance frameworks that Architects, Tech Leads, and engineers across the organisation follow.


• Technical owner from design to resolution of tailored solutions to sophisticated problems on cloud platforms based on requirements and other constraints.


• Architect and oversee the delivery of enterprise-grade AI systems - including LLM-powered features, RAG pipelines, agentic frameworks, and model inference infrastructure - across complex, multi-team programmes.


• Partners with appropriate stakeholders to determine functional and nonfunctional requirements, as well as business goals, for a set of scenarios.


• Advise stakeholders at senior and executive level on AI strategy, technology investment prioritisation, risk posture, and competitive positioning, translating ambition into technically sound, phased roadmaps.


• Assess and plan for new technology insertion.


• Continuously evaluate the global AI landscape - foundation model developments, emerging frameworks, and regulatory shifts - and brief engineering and business leadership on strategic implications.


• Manage risk identification and risk mitigation strategies associated with the architecture.


• Lead AI risk management at the organisational level: vendor lock-in, data privacy, model drift, adversarial inputs, and compliance with evolving AI regulation (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, GDPR, HIPAA).


• Influence and communicate long-term product vision, technical vision, development strategy and roadmap.


• Drive original IP creation: reusable AI architectural frameworks, reference architectures, accelerators, and internal tooling that increase 3Pillar’s competitive advantage across engagements.


• Contribute to code reviews, documentation and architectural artifacts.


• Establish and lead 3Pillar’s AI Centre of Excellence - curating architectural patterns, governing responsible AI standards, and publishing guidance consumed across the engineering organisation.


• Active leader in the Architecture Practice community, mentoring Engineers and others through Communities of Practice (CoPs) or on project teams, supporting the growth of technical capabilities.


• Serve as an external thought leader: representing 3Pillar at industry conferences, publishing research and whitepapers, and contributing to open-source projects or standards bodies in the AI domain.


• Contribute architectural skills within an Agile team, with no supervision or within a team of architects.


• Develop and execute or lead the execution of a technical vision, within one or more business or technical domains, with a focus on the business value.


• Design architectures that align with the DevOps culture and QA Automation practices.


• Integrate AI-powered capabilities into DevOps and QA practices - including automated code review, intelligent test generation, and AI-assisted security scanning - to raise the engineering standard across programmes.

Minimum Qualifications

• A Bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science or a related field.


• A minimum of 8+ years of experience/expertise working as a Software Architect, with proficiency in the specified technologies.


• High level of English proficiency required to interact with a globally-based development team.


• Communicate in a clear and understandable manner with stakeholders, and be able to articulate the details of the designed architecture using the appropriate level of technical language.


• Natural leader with critical reasoning and good decision making skills.


• Have extremely good knowledge on SDLC processes and familiarity with actionable metrics and KPIs.