Principal Digital Architect

Diversified Services Network, Inc. (DSN) is seeking a full-time Principal Digital Architect to join our team! We offer full benefits, PTO, 401k, and more! This is a fully remote role for candidates residing in the US, with a preferred location near Chicago, IL or Peoria, IL. If you are a seasoned architect ready to own end-to-end solutions for complex systems and influence enterprise technology strategy within an extremely reputable, stable Fortune 500 company — let’s talk!

Position Overview

We are seeking a Principal Digital Architect to play a key role owning end-to-end architecture solutions for complex systems - balancing scalability, performance, security, and rapid delivery - while influencing enterprise technology strategy. This role requires strong technical depth, architectural judgment, and the ability to translate ambiguous business needs into durable, scalable solutions. You will join a team of 18.

Key Contributions & Responsibilities

• Own and define solution and platform architectures for large-scale, distributed systems from concept through production, meeting high standards for scalability, performance, resilience, and security.
• Partner closely with business leaders, product owners, engineering managers, and delivery teams to ensure architectural alignment with business outcomes.
• Assess, select, and introduce new technologies, including proof of concept development and architectural spikes.
• Establish and enforce architectural standards, patterns, and best practices across platform teams; provide architectural guidance and mentorship to engineering teams.
• Ensure solutions meet security, compliance, and regulatory requirements; produce and maintain clear architecture documentation, including rationale and trade-offs.
• Continuously evolve platform architecture to improve developer productivity, system reliability, and cost efficiency.

Team Structure & Work Environment

• You will be part of a team of 18, partnering closely with business leaders, product owners, engineering managers, and delivery teams.

Requirements

Education & Experience

• Bachelor’s degree required with 5+ years of relevant experience.

Required Technical Skills

• Architectural thinking — ability to decompose complex problem spaces and develop pragmatic architecture options with clearly articulated trade-offs.
• Technical leadership — ability to influence without authority and guide teams through architectural decisions and implementation challenges.
• Strong communication skills — ability to clearly articulate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Requirements analysis — ability to translate business and non-functional requirements into scalable technical designs.
• Platform and application architecture — strong foundation in designing modern application and platform architectures using established patterns and standards.

Desired Technical Skills

• Experience defining AI reference architectures and standards for enterprise adoption; ability to explain and defend architectural trade-offs between classical ML, LLM-based approaches, and non-AI solutions.
• Proven experience taking AI systems from proof of concept to scaled production use, including hands-on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture design — data ingestion pipelines, document preprocessing/chunking strategies, vectorization and embedding models, and query-time retrieval, ranking, and context assembly.
• Deep understanding of embedding techniques, similarity search, and related trade-offs (vector dimensions, chunk size/overlap, latency vs. recall vs. cost); experience with vector databases and search layers and their integration into application architectures.
• Experience with agentic frameworks and the ability to architect end-to-end AI workflows, including prompt design and versioning, context management and memory patterns, and model routing/fallback strategies.
• Knowledge of LLM lifecycle considerations — model selection (hosted vs. self-hosted), fine-tuning vs. RAG vs. hybrid approaches, and evaluation, monitoring, and drift detection.
• Strong understanding of AI system non-functional requirements, including performance/latency optimization, cost controls and token efficiency, and security, data privacy, and guardrails.
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into existing enterprise platforms via APIs and event-driven architectures; ability to assess, prototype, and productionize emerging AI technologies aligned to business use cases.
• Strong programming background in Python and Java, with the ability to reason at the code level.
• Proven experience designing and building enterprise-sca