Description
Principal Architect
Location: Washington, DC
About the Role
We are seeking a Principal Architect to drive the design, development, and deployment of our agentic AI products in a fast-paced, collaborative, extremely high-visibility environment.
In this role, you will lead a team of 50+ engineers, providing both strategic and technical guidance. You’ll be responsible for high-impact architectural decisions, cross-company collaboration, and executive level engagements.
What You’ll Do
- Team Leadership: Lead and mentor a high-performing engineering team of 80+, fostering a culture of technical excellence and ownership.
- Technical Direction: Guide your team through complex challenges involving LLMs, AI agents, and large-scale distributed systems.
- Executive Stakeholder Engagement: Represent Scale AI in high-stakes negotiations and strategic discussions with senior external partners, demonstrating strong technical competence and credibility.
- Strategic Planning & Communication: Develop and communicate a compelling vision for Scale AI’s technology applied to your program. Provide regular updates to senior leadership and key stakeholders on progress, risks, and opportunities.
- Culture & Teamwork: Foster a culture of speed, unity of purpose, resilience, and teamwork. Lead through uncertainty with determination and adaptability.
What We’re Looking For
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in a technical leadership or staff role.
- Deep understanding of modern AI/ML technologies, including experience working with LLMs and AI agents.
- Proficient in one or more modern programming languages (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript)
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
- Strong product and business sense, with a track record of aligning engineering efforts with company goals.
- Ability to operate effectively in ambiguous, fast-changing environments and guide your team to do the same.
- Experience in executive level engagement with industry partners and Public Sector customers
Success Metrics
Within 6 months:
- Successful demonstration of agentic AI’s mission value in high-stakes customer demonstrations
- Establish Scale AI as the preferred agentic AI partner for the PEO
- Establish high velocity, agile engineering cadence both internally and with our industry partners
Within 12–18 months:
- Secure follow-on contract award with expanded scope for Scale
- Position Scale AI as the global AI leader in this mission area
- Establish developed solutions as Scale product offerings to deliver on future contracts
Compensation packages at Scale for eligible roles include base salary, equity, and benefits. The range displayed on each job posting reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for the position and may be inclusive of several career levels at Scale; it will be determined during the interview process based on work location and additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, qualifications, interview performance, and relevant education or training. Scale employees in eligible roles are also granted equity based compensation, subject to Board of Director approval. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process, and confirm whether the hired role will be eligible for equity grant. You'll also receive benefits including, but not limited to: comprehensive health, dental and vision coverage, retirement benefits, a learning and development stipend, and generous PTO. Additionally, this role may be eligible for additional benefits such as a commuter stipend.
PLEASE NOTE: Our policy requires a 90-day waiting period before reconsidering candidates for the same role. This allows us to ensure a fair and thorough evaluation of all applicants.
About Us:
At Scale, our mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. Our products provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's leading models, and help enterprises and governments build, deploy, and oversee AI applications that deliver real impact. We work closely with industry leaders like Meta, Ernst & Young, Mayo Clinic, Time Inc., the Government of Qatar, and U.S. government agencies including the Army and Air Force. We are expanding our team to accelerate the development of AI applications.
We believe that everyone should be able to bring their whole selves to work, which is why we are proud to be an inclusive and equal opportunity workplace. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, disability status, gender identity or Veteran status.
We are committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with physical and mental disabilities. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation in the application or recruiting process due to a disability, please contact us at accommodations@scale.com. Please see the United States Department of Labor's Know Your Rights poster for additional information.
We comply with the United States Department of Labor's Pay Transparency provision.
PLEASE NOTE: We collect, retain and use personal data for our professional business purposes, including notifying you of job opportunities that may be of interest and sharing with our affiliates. We limit the personal data we collect to that which we believe is appropriate and necessary to manage applicants’ needs, provide our services, and comply with applicable laws. Any information we collect in connection with your application will be treated in accordance with our internal policies and programs designed to protect personal data. Please see our privacy policy for additional information.
Similar jobs
Est. 207,700 USD
Scale's public sector business is providing the best of American commercial technology and innovation to protect the homeland and meet the moment. As a member of our public sector delivery team, you will own relationship…
Est. 207,700 USD
Scale's public sector business is providing the best of American commercial technology and innovation to protect the homeland and meet the moment. As a member of our public sector delivery team, you will own relationship…
Est. 276,600 USD
Scale AI is seeking a highly skilled and motivated Team Lead for our ARC (Architecture, Reliability, & Compute) team supporting our dynamic Public Sector Engineering team. As the lead of this team, you will define ho…
Est. 224,100 USD
Scale AI is at the forefront of the AI revolution, helping the U.S. government unlock the potential of AI across national security missions. We’re building enterprise-grade generative AI solutions and delivering them int…
Est. 198,900 USD
Scale is building AI for the world’s most important decisions. From the front lines of homeland security to the core of global enterprise, we provide the data engine and agentic infrastructure that powers the next genera…
Est. 228,600 USD
Scale is building AI for the world's most consequential decisions. In the Intelligence Community, that means deploying Agentic AI into the workflows that power overhead intelligence, geospatial analysis, and imagery expl…
Est. 277,500 USD
Role: Scale is at the forefront of the AI revolution, working across the US government, partners and allies around the world to unlock the potential of generative AI (GenAI). We are seeking a product leader to join our t…
Est. 207,700 USD
Scale's public sector business is providing the best of American commercial technology and innovation to protect the homeland and meet the moment. As a member of our public sector delivery team, you will own relationship…
Est. 205,200 USD
Chief of Staff, Public Sector As the Chief of Staff for Scale AI’s Public Sector business unit, you will be a strategic partner to the VP, Public Sector Engineering & Security, driving the execution of critical initi…
Est. 228,600 USD
Scale is building AI for the world’s most important decisions. From the front lines of national defense to the core of global enterprise, we provide the data engine and agentic infrastructure that powers the next generat…
Est. 207,700 USD
Scale's public sector business is providing the best of American commercial technology and innovation to protect the homeland and meet the moment. As a member of our public sector delivery team, you will own relationship…
Est. 243,000 USD
Scale AI’s Public Sector business is growing quickly as government agencies adopt AI to support critical national security, defense, and public sector missions. We’re looking for a hands-on Engineering Manager to lead a…
Est. 251,100 USD
At Scale, we build the AI systems behind some of the country's most important decisions. On the Public Sector Engineering team, you'll embed directly with U.S. government customers, including the Army, Air Force, Joint c…
Est. 307,000 USD
The Public Sector software engineers (SWEs) create the core product building blocks forward-deployed teams use to develop agentic capabilities that function across multiple domains. SWEs responsibilities include building…
Est. 202,500 USD
The Public Sector software engineers (SWEs) create the core product building blocks forward-deployed teams use to develop agentic capabilities that function across multiple domains. SWEs responsibilities include building…
Est. 263,500 USD
The Public Sector software engineers (SWEs) create the core product building blocks forward-deployed teams use to develop agentic capabilities that function across multiple domains. SWEs responsibilities include building…
Est. 221,700 USD
Scale AI is seeking a highly skilled and motivated Software Engineer, ARC (Architecture, Reliability, & Compute) to join our dynamic Public Sector Engineering team. As a part of this team, you will define how the com…
Est. 210,600 USD
Scale's Public Sector customer base is growing rapidly, and you will ensure that these customers become passionate, lifelong Scale partners. As a member of our Public Sector Delivery team, you are a catalyst, willing to…
Est. 209,700 USD
Scale AI is seeking a highly skilled and motivated Software Engineer to join our dynamic Public Sector Engineering team. As a part of this team, you will play a critical role in supporting Scale’s government customers by…
Est. 320,850 USD
About Scale AI Scale’s mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world’s most important decisions. We work with leading enterprises to bring generative AI safely into production—powering real-world impact through…
Est. 243,225 USD
Scale GP is building the infrastructure that makes enterprise AI seamless. We are looking for a Senior Infrastructure Engineer to act as a primary technical lead, engineering the 'paved road' for our knowledge retrieval…
Est. 203,550 USD
As a Field Engineer on our federal AI projects, you'll work directly with our largest public sector customers to make sure their experience with Scale's technology is smooth and successful. You'll help these customers bu…
Est. 279,450 USD
About Scale Scale's mission is to develop reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions. As the leading AI data foundry, we provide the high-quality data and full-stack technologies that power the world's…
Est. 254,100 USD
The goal of a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Scale is to leverage techniques in the fields of generative AI, computer vision, reinforcement learning, and agentic AI to improve Scale's products and customer experienc…
Est. 202,500 USD
Scale GP is Scale's enterprise Generative AI platform—APIs and infrastructure for knowledge retrieval, inference, evaluation, and intelligent automation. We power mission-critical workflows for leading enterprises, helpi…
Est. 207,700 USD
Scale AI is at the forefront of the AI revolution, helping the U.S. government unlock the potential of AI across national security missions. We’re building enterprise-grade generative AI solutions and delivering them int…
Est. 214,950 USD
At Scale, we build the AI systems behind some of the country's most important decisions. On the Public Sector Engineering team, you'll embed directly with U.S. government customers, including the Army, Air Force, Joint c…
Est. 221,720 USD
Scale AI is seeking a highly skilled and motivated Software Engineer, Frontier AI Infrastructure to join our dynamic Public Sector Engineering team. As a part of this team, you will own the model inference layer - enabli…
Est. 215,000 USD
Scale AI is seeking a highly skilled and motivated AI Data Engineer to join our dynamic Federal Engineering team. As a part of this team, you will play a critical role in supporting Scale’s government customers by scopin…
Est. 187,700 USD
At Scale, we believe that AI will dramatically improve the world, and our mission is to accelerate the development of AI. As Scale continues to grow its Government Relations function, we are looking for a National Securi…