{"id":844897,"url":"https://alion.io/job/the-information-ai-architect","title":"AI Architect","company":{"id":11358,"name":"The Information","domain":"theinformation.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/the-information","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Rippling","truth_index":null},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"board_field","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":["US"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":{"min":155000,"max":175000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":175000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Django","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"RAG","optional":true},{"name":"Ruby","optional":true},{"name":"Ruby on Rails","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-11T14:38:57Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-11","last_verified_at":"2026-09-28T00:39:14Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":16,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":16},"description":"About The Information\nThe Information is the go-to source of in-depth reporting for the most influential leaders in technology and business. Founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, our original, high-quality journalism has the power to inform the most consequential decisions shaping our future, and we’ve built a community of 700,000 active readers who depend on us to do just that. We have a financially healthy business, plenty of capital, and big ambitions to grow our team and business.\nAbout the Role\nWe're looking for an AI Architect to lead the design, evolution, and scaling of our AI pipeline infrastructure. You'll take ownership of a backend platform built to orchestrate AI workflows at scale, and extend it to support a growing set of high-fan-out AI features that are central to our product strategy.\nWhat You'll Inherit\nOur AI infrastructure is built around an internal, API-only backend service responsible for orchestrating AI pipelines end to end. It runs on a modern web framework with a background job processing system, backed by a relational database, and is designed around durable, observable, idempotent jobs rather than ad hoc scripts. Some earlier AI workflows still run on a separate orchestration framework and are being progressively migrated into this platform.\nKey infrastructure you'll own:\nAn internal, API-only backend application deployed on a cloud PaaS (staging and production environments)\nA background job processing system with multiple queues and a durable message broker\nA dedicated relational database for pipeline state and history\nA job base class/pattern that provides idempotency guards, status-transition state machines, retry-with-backoff, structured logging, and error reporting on failure\nAuthenticated API access for inbound integrations, with secure credential management for outbound integrations\nMultiple LLM providers for generation, structured output, and embeddings\nA vector database for similarity search and matching at scale\nIntegrations with adjacent internal systems (content/CMS, notifications, messaging/chat tooling, tracing and error-monitoring platforms)\nWhat you'll do\nOwn and Operate (Immediate)\nMaintain and operate all existing AI pipelines running on the platform\nComplete the migration of remaining workflows from the legacy orchestration framework to the primary platform\nOwn on-call response for AI pipeline failures, including failed-job triage and retries\nManage LLM provider relationships, API key rotation, cost tracking, and model upgrades\nArchitect and Scale (Ongoing)\nDesign and implement new high-fan-out AI pipelines on the existing platform - built to support future horizontal workflows (many generations across many users/items) without significant rework\nEstablish patterns and conventions for onboarding new pipelines, including registry entries, job subclassing, batch fan-out, and automated reporting\nDrive architectural decisions around data storage strategy, queue partitioning, concurrency throttling, and cost controls as pipeline volume grows\nEvaluate and integrate new LLM providers and embedding models as the landscape evolves, while maintaining backward compatibility with existing vector data\nBuild observability and operational tooling - extending the primary ops dashboard with custom reporting, cost tracking, and alerting as needed\nCollaborate and Lead\nPartner with product, editorial/content, and growth teams to translate product requirements into pipeline designs\nWork across the engineering organization to integrate AI pipelines with the broader technical stack\nMentor engineers on AI pipeline patterns, prompt engineering, and platform architecture\nOwn the technical proposal process for new pipelines and major infrastructure changes\nRequired Qualifications\nDeep backend framework expertise - 5+ years building production applications in a modern web framework (e.g., Rails, Django, or similar), with strong experience in ORM usage, API-only application design, and background job processing\nJob orchestration at scale - Proven experience designing idempotent, retryable, fan-out job pipelines (batching, concurrency controls, dead-letter handling, queue partitioning)\nLLM integration experience - Hands-on work with multiple LLM providers, structured output, embeddings, prompt engineering, and cost tracking\nVector search infrastructure - Experience with a vector database for similarity matching at scale (batched queries, namespace management, embedding model migration)\nProduction operations mindset - Experience running internal services on a cloud PaaS or equivalent, with relational databases, caching/queueing infrastructure, and observability tooling\nArchitecture and proposal-driven development - Track record of authoring technical design documents, making build-vs-buy decisions, and designing platforms meant to be extended by others\nPreferred Qualifications\n5+ Years of Ruby/Ruby on Rails experience\nExperience migrating workflows from a Python-based orchestration framework to Ruby-based framework\nFamiliarity with agent orchestration and LLM tracing/observability ecosystems\nExperience with AI alerting or notification systems (change detection, embedding-based matching, threshold tuning)\nBackground in media/publishing AI applications (personalization, content recommendation, cohort-based delivery)\nExperience with state machine libraries for managing job lifecycles\nExperience building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines - grounding LLM outputs in retrieved documents or context, not just retrieval-based matching/ranking\nWhat Success Looks Like\nFirst 90 days: All existing pipelines are stable and well-understood. Remaining migrations are scoped and underway. You've shipped at least one new pipeline or major platform improvement.\nFirst year: The platform is the single home for all AI orchestration. New pipelines are onboarded in days, not sprints. LLM costs are tracked and optimized. The team trusts the platform's reliability and observability.\nBenefits\nWe offer a comprehensive and competitive benefits package designed to support the well-being of our employees and their families, including:\nCompany-paid medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents\nMedical coverage that includes fertility care and $0 copays for in-office mental health visits with in-network providers\nPaid parental leave to support and empower new parents\nGenerous paid time off (PTO) that increases with tenure\n401(k) plan with employer matching contributions\nFlexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) for healthcare and dependent care expenses\nFitness and wellness stipend to encourage a healthy lifestyle\nMonthly cell phone reimbursement\nCompany-sponsored lunches in the office every Monday\nCommuter benefits \nA supportive, inclusive, and diverse work environment with a zero-tolerance policy for harassment\nWe can only accept applications from those eligible to live and work in the United States.\nSalary Range: $155,000 - $175,000 USD Annually + Bonus + Benefits\nThe salary range posted is based on the company's good faith belief at the time of the posting. Actual compensation may vary above or below this range based on factors such as location, work experience, and skill level.\nWe are an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We are committed to diversity and to building an inclusive environment for people of all backgrounds and ages.","description_format":"text","description_chars":7562,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["IT News & Tech Media"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-13T00:01:53Z"}],"liveness":{"score":34,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.459,"p_room":0.75,"age_days":15,"expected_fill_days":16,"reasons":["conf:8","win:late"],"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":175000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/the-information-ai-architect","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/the-information-ai-architect.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-28T03:56:49Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2365,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2635,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-29T00:00:00Z"}}}