AI Architect - Toronto - Persistent Systems

Description

We are an AI-led, platform-driven Digital Engineering and Enterprise Modernization partner, combining deep technical expertise and industry experience to help our clients anticipate what's next. Our offerings and proven solutions create a unique competitive advantage for our clients by giving them the power to see beyond and rise above. We work with many industry-leading organizations across the world, including 20 Fortune 50 companies and 4 of the 5 top banks in both the US and India, and numerous innovators across the healthcare ecosystem.

Our disruptor's mindset, commitment to client success, and agility to thrive in the dynamic environment have enabled us to sustain our growth momentum. Persistent has been recognized across top industry platforms for innovation, leadership, and inclusion. We have delivered 23 sequential quarters of growth with $422.5M in Q3 FY26 revenue, up 4.0% Q-o-Q and 17.3% Y-o-Y growth. Our 26,500+ global team members, located in 18 countries, have been instrumental in helping the market leaders transform their industries. We won the 2025 ISG Star of Excellence Award for AI and Data Excellence and were named a Leader in the Everest Group Talent Readiness for Next-generation Data, Analytics and AI Services PEAK Matrix Assessment 2025.

About Position

• Role:AI Architect
• Experience: 12+ years
• Job Type: Full Time / Contract
• Mandatory Skills: AI, ML, Agentic AI, LLM,

We are seeking an AI Architect to lead the design of next-generation enterprise AI systems centered on Agentic AI, advanced RAG patterns, multimodal model integration, and secure orchestration frameworks. This role focuses entirely on model integration, inference optimization, safety, orchestration, document ingestion, evaluation, and architecture. The architect will drive standards for multi-agent orchestration, tool calling, governance, and design patterns across business and engineering teams.

Expertise You\'ll Bring

AI & ML

• Agentic AI
• RAG / Graph RAG
• Inference optimization (vLLM, TGI)
• Multi-agent orchestration
• Secure API integration

Data & Platform

• Databricks ML, Unity Catalog, MLflow
• Vector Search & retrieval systems

AI Safety & Governance

• Evaluation tools
• Responsible AI compliance

What You'll Do

AI Strategy, Architecture & Governance

The AI Architect will define enterprise AI architecture that incorporates Agentic RAG, Graph RAG, Master-Agent orchestration, A2A agent communication, and MCP-based extensibility with tool calling. This involves shaping standards for how agents plan, reason, ground their responses, call tools safely, and collaborate autonomously. It also sets direction for LLMOps and AgentOps patterns, ensuring alignment with data governance, responsible AI frameworks, and enterprise security requirements.

This role leads the end-to-end architecture of AI applications such as intelligent copilots, autonomous agents, workflow orchestration systems, knowledge-grounded assistants, and agentic marketing solutions. The architect integrates open-source and commercial LLMs, Vision-LLMs (e.g., Florence‑2, LLaVA, Qwen-VL), and diffusion models for text‑to‑image and emerging text‑to‑video capabilities. Rather than training models, the architect ensures secure, optimized inference and efficient orchestration using frameworks like vLLM, TGI, Hugging Face pipelines, and Databricks-first pipelines for governance (Unity Catalog), lineage tracking (MLflow), and semantic retrieval (Databricks Vector Search). Tool calling plays a central role as the architectural pattern for enabling LLMs and agents to safely interact with enterprise systems, APIs, knowledge stores, and other agents.

The architect designs standardized, scalable ingestion workflows for enterprise PPT/PDF content using tools such as , MarkItDown, Apache Tika, PyMuPDF, and python‑pptx. These pipelines incorporate OCR and layout understanding through LayoutParser, docTR, PaddleOCR, and OpenCV, as well as Vision-LLMs for interpreting charts, diagrams, and complex layouts. Ingestion workflows support semantic chunking, metadata enrichment, table extraction, media handling, and slide-aware structuring, all governed through Unity Catalog with indexing and retrieval powered by Databricks Vector Search. Tool calling is incorporated to allow agents to retrieve, interpret, or update knowledge assets securely and dynamically.

AI Safety, Guardrails & Evaluation

The AI Architect leads the design of safety, grounding, and evaluation systems using frameworks like DeepTeam and NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails to enforce policy constraints, reduce hallucinations, ensure topic control, and maintain safe conversational boundaries. Evaluation strategies include DeepEval for behavioral and correctness testing, Ragas for RAG performance metrics, and human‑in‑the‑loop validation for high-stakes workflows. The role ensures every agent and LLM-powered system adheres to Responsible AI, data protection, and compliance frameworks, with robust logging, lineage, and auditability.

Technical Leadership

The AI Architect provides thought leadership across engineering, data, and product teams, creating reference architectures for AgentOps, RAG frameworks, tool calling patterns, ingestion pipelines, and evaluation standards. They guide architectural reviews, mentor teams on best practices for prompt design, grounding, safety, and workflow orchestration, and communicate complex AI strategies to both technical and executive stakeholders. The role requires strong judgment, clear articulation of trade-offs, and the ability to influence across multiple domains without direct authority.

All About You

You bring deep experience designing AI systems built on Agentic RAG, Graph RAG, multi-agent orchestration, and structured tool calling. You are skilled in integrating LLMs, Vision-LLMs, and diffusion models for inference and multimodal understanding, and you're comfortable architecting secure, compliant pipelines using platforms like Databricks ML, Unity Catalog, MLflow, and Databricks Vector Search. You have hands-on expertise with document ingestion frameworks for PPT/PDF content, OCR and layout tools, semantic chunking, and multimodal enrichment. You excel at bridging business, engineering, and governance perspectives, and you are committed to Responsible AI and secure enterprise design.

Corporate Security Responsibilities

All AI systems must comply with security, privacy, and model governance standards. This includes safeguarding sensitive data, following security policies, reporting incidents promptly, and completing required compliance and AI safety training.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package
• Culture focused on talent development with quarterly promotion cycles and company-sponsored higher education and certifications
• Opportunity to work with cutting-edge technologies
• Employee engagement initiatives such as project parties, flexible work hours, and Long Service awards
• Insurance coverage: group term life, personal accident, and Mediclaim hospitalization for self, spouse, two children, and parents

Our Values

• Our company fosters a values-driven and people-centric work environment that enables our employees to:
• Accelerate growth, both professionally and personally
• Impact the world in powerful, positive ways, using the latest technologies
• Enjoy collaborative innovation, with diversity and work-life wellbeing at the core
• Unlock global opportunities to work and learn with the industry's best

Let's unleash your full potential at Persistent -

For more details, please contact Bharath Veluru )

"Persistent is an Equal Opportunity Employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any kind."