Applied AI Architect Sr Director

Overview

Senior Director role leading the Applied AI architecture for Syneos Health, owning reference architecture, reusable AI platform patterns, AI-PDLC standards and AI governance across three portfolios.

What you'll do

• Own reference architecture for Applied AI and Product AI solutions across all three portfolios.
• Design GenAI, RAG, knowledge engineering and Agentic AI solutions through to production.
• Define model selection, prompt, context and grounding strategies per use case.
• Set patterns for retrieval quality, vectorization and knowledge lifecycle.
• Validate architecture hands-on with product engineering teams.
• Curate the catalog of reusable Applied AI building blocks.
• Ensure solutions compose from approved services rather than duplicate capability.
• Partner with Enterprise Data, Architecture and AI platform teams on delivery patterns covering enterprise LLM services, RAG frameworks, knowledge engineering, orchestration, agentic workflows, and evaluation and observability standards.
• Define standards, templates and skills that operationalize AI-PDLC across the SDLC.
• Architect copilot and AI-assisted development workflows into the toolchain.
• Set guardrails and quality gates for AI-generated code, tests and documentation.
• Define productivity telemetry and value realization metrics.
• Own the AI design review gate covering architecture fit, risk and reuse before build.
• Maintain AI governance standards with Data Governance, Security and Compliance.
• Ensure teams use org-approved AI tools, models and enterprise endpoints.
• Set evaluation, regression and drift detection standards for models and prompts.
• Drive token metering, cached prompts and context optimization.
• Meet regulated-industry privacy, auditability and validation requirements.
• Act as technical advisor to Development, QE and the Clinical, Commercial and Corporate leads.
• Mentor engineers on AI design, prompt and context engineering, and evaluation.
• Support build-versus-buy and platform decisions with clear trade-offs.
• Contribute to insourcing through capability mapping and skill definition.

Details

• Location: Hyderabad, India.
• Work mode: Hybrid.