AI Architect

Change.org http://Change.org is searching for an AI Architect. You will report to our CTO. As a key member of our Engineering team, you’ll lead through technical authority, hands-on work, and influence — not through a reporting line. You’ll operate as the org-wide technical owner for AI adoption, working across every engineering team. Change.org http://Change.org is the world’s largest platform for democracy. At a time when dissatisfaction with democracy globally is at an all-time high, we’re investing heavily in using AI to build an operating system for modern democracy. This includes our platform for giving people greater voice, a personalized voter guide for elections, and a new product which aims to bring people across the political spectrum together to identify shared solutions. To realize this vision, we're building a team at the intersection of technology and civic engagement — bringing together top talent focused on giving citizens a direct voice, strengthening accountability, and building stronger, more resilient democracies. Key Outcomes: - Technical direction for AI adoption. Define and evolve the standards, architecture patterns, and tooling choices that govern how engineers use AI across the codebase — including where to invest in codebase readiness (instrumentation, specification, evaluation) versus targeted rewrites. - The AI-Native Transformation roadmap. Own execution of the multi-milestone plan (readiness → validated → governed) applied to primary and secondary repos, in partnership with squad leads — without being their manager. - Platform and tooling capability. Decide what AI tooling, agent infrastructure, and evaluation pipelines the org needs, and build or oversee the build of the ones that don't exist yet. - Guardrails for safe adoption. Set the policy and technical controls for where human-in-the-loop review is required versus where autonomous agent action (PR review, deployment) is safe — resolving the tension between adoption speed and security/quality risk. - Standards authorship and enforcement. Write the guidance engineers actually use — AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md http://AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md conventions, review norms for AI-generated code, eval standards — and make sure it's adopted, not just published. The most important core competencies for the role are: - AI/LLM systems fluency. Deep, current hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic systems — not just using AI coding assistants, but understanding how to architect around them. - Software architecture at scale. Track record designing and evolving systems in large, mature codebases (multi-million line, many-service environments). - Hands-on engineering credibility. Enough recent, real shipping experience that senior engineers treat this person as a peer, not a strategist parachuting in. - Standards authorship. Experience writing technical standards or guidance that other engineers actually adopted — with evidence, not just documents that sat unread. - Security and risk judgment. Comfortable making the call on where autonomous AI action is safe and where it isn't, and defending that call under pressure. - Change management without authority. Has driven org-wide technical change as an IC, influencing teams they don't manage. - Communication and translation. Can move fluidly between deep technical detail and an executive-level narrative. NICE TO HAVE - Experience leading an AI or developer-productivity transformation at a similar-scale engineering org. - Experience building or operating evaluation pipelines for AI systems. Target experience: - 10+ years of software engineering experience, with several at staff/principal level or above. - Ownership of a large, mature codebase's evolution - Architected or evolved a dominant monolith or multi-service system at scale. - High adoption of Standards - Authored technical conventions, review norms, or architectural guardrails that other engineering teams actually adopted — with evidence of adoption.. Inte…