Technical lead/architect - ai platforms

A hands-on technical leadership role accountable for the architecture, engineering, and reliability of Abbott's enterprise AI Platform: the control plane and paved road that let teams build, deploy, and operate enterprise GenAI and agentic systems safely and quickly. This role is the technical counterpart to the Product Manager, AI Platform and partners with AI Product Managers, AI/Agentic Engineering, Applied Data Science, security, and division engineering teams. The role is Director-mapped and begins as a player-coach, with responsibility to grow and lead a platform engineering team.

What You'll Do

• Define and evolve the reference architecture for the AI control plane, paved-road services, SDKs, templates, and developer experience.
• Design and build a model gateway that supports multi-provider routing, failover, quota and rate limiting, tenant isolation, key management, token accounting, and cost allocation (e.g., a LiteLLM-style gateway over Azure OpenAI, Amazon Bedrock, or Vertex AI).
• Deliver a GenAI runtime for model serving, retrieval-augmented generation, context and memory stores, vector and hybrid search, sandboxed tool or code execution, secrets brokering, and MCP-style tool interoperability.
• Own the technical design of model, agent, prompt, and tool registries, including versioning, lineage, approval and promotion gates, deprecation, and auditability.
• Build platform observability and traceability for prompts, model calls, tool calls, and agent steps using distributed tracing (e.g., OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions and Langfuse- or Arize-class tooling), with evaluation, quality, drift, latency, and cost signals.
• Implement security, guardrails, and responsible-AI controls in the platform, including PII/PHI handling, prompt-injection defenses, identity-on-behalf-of, least-privilege tool access, and policy enforcement.
• Establish platform engineering practices using Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, secure software development, capacity management, and reliability engineering.
• Define SLOs, participate in on-call, and lead incident response.
• Write and review production code, conduct architecture reviews, set engineering standards, and make pragmatic build-versus-buy and vendor recommendations with budget input.
• Hire, coach, and develop a platform engineering team of approximately 38 engineers; allocate work, set goals, and manage career development while remaining technically hands-on.
• Partner with the Product Manager, AI Platform to sequence the platform roadmap, communicate tradeoffs, and measure adoption, reliability, time-to-onboard, and consumer-team outcomes.

Skills

• Architecture
• Solution architecture
• Design
• Agile
• artificial intelligence

Additional Skills & Qualifications

• Experience building enterprise GenAI or agent platforms using capabilities such as multi-model routing, agent registries, prompt management, evaluation harnesses, and GenAI tracing.
• Experience in a highly regulated environment such as health tech, med-tech, or life sciences, with GxP, HIPAA, validation, auditability, and change-control constraints.
• Experience implementing security, responsible-AI, privacy, policy, and cost or FinOps controls for shared AI infrastructure.
• Experience with open standards and tooling such as MCP, OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and cloud-native platform engineering practices.

Job Type & Location

This is a Contract position based out of North Chicago, IL.

Pay and Benefits

The pay range for this position is $100.00 - $120.00/hr. Individual compensation offered for this position within this range will depend on many factors, including qualifications, skills, relevant experience, job knowledge, geographic location, internal equity, and other pertinent job-related factors.

Eligibility requirements apply to some benefits and may depend on your job classification and length of employment. Benefits are subject to change and may be subject to specific elections, plan, or program terms. If eligible, the benefits available for this temporary role may include the following: Medical, dental & vision Critical Illness, Accident, and Hospital 401(k) Retirement Plan Pre-tax and Roth post-tax contributions available Life Insurance (Voluntary Life & AD&D for the employee and dependents) Short and long-term disability Health Spending Account (HSA) Transportation benefits Employee Assistance Program Time Off/Leave (PTO, Vacation or Sick Leave)

Application Deadline

This position is anticipated to close on Nov 6, 2026.

Workplace Type

This is a fully remote position.