Engineering Architect

Who We Are

Every organization runs on intelligence: years of accumulated knowledge, decisions, and context. As AI takes on more of that work, companies face a choice: rent that intelligence from vendors who keep the data, the context, and the results, or own it.

OpenTeams exists to make ownership possible.

Founded by Travis Oliphant, creator of NumPy and SciPy, and built by people with deep roots across the open-source ecosystem, including NumPy, SciPy, PyTorch, and Jupyter, we help enterprises and governments build AI they control, govern, and evolve themselves.

If that sounds like your kind of work, we'd like to meet you.

Engineering Architect

Location: This is a U.S.-remote position, with preference given to candidates in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.

Work Authorization: U.S. citizenship required

Clearance: Candidates must be eligible and willing to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance, which includes a federal background investigation.

Salary Range: $145,000–$250,000 USD, dependent on experience level and location

About the Role

We’re seeking an Engineering Architect to own the end-to-end technical design of a secure AI test and evaluation platform supporting Government teams responsible for assessing AI systems before fielding.

The program spans shared evaluation interfaces, dataset and model tooling, ML infrastructure, web services, and the packaging and delivery systems used to deploy capabilities into secure Government environments. This role ensures those components form a coherent, scalable, secure, and interoperable technical solution.

You’ll establish architecture standards, make build-versus-buy-versus-adopt decisions across the open-source landscape, resolve cross-cutting technical decisions, and guide the solution from initial concept through deployment and sustainment. You’ll also serve as a senior technical advisor to Government stakeholders and internal engineering teams.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect and maintain comprehensive system blueprints, strategic technology roadmaps, and foundational design principles for sophisticated open-source artificial intelligence solutions.
• Design and govern interface standards to guarantee seamless integration between platform services, evaluation frameworks, underlying infrastructure, and third-party systems.
• Assess emerging open-source and commercial technologies, thoroughly documenting trade-offs regarding technical feasibility, operations, security posture, and long-term viability.
• Deliver strategic recommendations on build, buy, or adopt decisions across the software portfolio.
• Incorporate public-sector hosting, identity management, cybersecurity, compliance accreditation, and integration mandates into core system designs from project inception.
• Conduct cross-functional engineering design reviews to resolve complex architectural dependencies and align team initiatives.
• Institute enterprise architecture standards, repeatable software patterns, security guardrails, and rigorous design review workflows.
• Serve as the primary technical advocate during public-sector design reviews, program reviews, and strategic partner engagements.
• Convert high-level mission goals, program objectives, and security policies into actionable technical tasks for development teams.
• Offer high-level technical guidance on open-source ecosystems including PyTorch, JAX, Ray, Kubeflow, MCP, and open-weights foundation models.
• Pinpoint, formalize, and proactively neutralize technical risks across every stage of the software life cycle.
• Drive business development and proposal efforts by authoring technical architecture documentation, effort estimates, roadmaps, and statements of work.
• Collaborate with infrastructure, platform, machine learning, data engineering, security, and software teams to ensure unified implementation of target designs.
• Steer technical solutions from production deployment through operational testing, acceptance, and long-term sustainment.
• Advise engineering staff and tech leads, driving decisive, structured engineering practices throughout the organization

Required Skills & Experience

• Must hold U.S. citizenship and maintain eligibility for Secret clearance authorization.
• Eight or more years delivering enterprise-grade software engineering solutions.
• At least three years leading end-to-end platform design and technical strategy.
• Proven track record building and deploying production distributed cloud architectures.
• Comprehensive mastery spanning CI/CD, modern package distribution, machine learning platforms, data pipelines, and API services.
• Specialized domain mastery in MLOps, generative AI, agentic systems, or cloud infrastructure, paired with practical familiarity across adjacent technical domains.
• Advanced Python proficiency complemented by rigorous knowledge of object-oriented design, architectural patterns, and systemic software fundamentals.
• Demonstrated success establishing contract interface specifications, foundational engineering roadmaps, and org-wide design standards.
• Experience conducting thorough technical evaluations and documenting strategic build-versus-buy trade-offs.
• Adept at proactively resolving enterprise challenges involving system security, high availability, resilience, and operational scalability.
• History of steering cross-functional initiatives across multi-disciplinary engineering groups.
• Exceptional communication capabilities for articulating technical topics to both executive leadership and engineering peers.
• Skilled at translating complex technical choices, system risks, and structural trade-offs for diverse public-sector and executive audiences.
• Self-directed contributor with a strong ability to drive outcomes within remote, decentralized team environments.

Nice to Have

• Demonstrated history architecting solutions for defense, intelligence, or federal defense initiatives.
• Working knowledge of modern public-sector software paradigms, including Platform One and defense DevSecOps frameworks.
• Proven track record engineering system infrastructure for air-gapped, isolated, or security-restricted networks.
• Background designing artificial intelligence validation infrastructure, data management tooling, and evaluation pipelines.
• Practical familiarity with Risk Management Framework protocols, authority to operate standards, and accredited system boundaries.
• Active engagement in open-source ecosystems through core maintainership, pull requests, technical blogging, or conference engagement.
• Direct experience leveraging the PyData and Scientific Python software stack.
• Proven capabilities in technical consulting, solution advisory, or client-facing architectural roles.
• Possessing a current or prior federal security clearance.

Grow With Us

At OpenTeams, growth isn’t just about the company—it’s about you.

We believe the best careers are built at the edge of your potential. That is where new tools, ideas, and technologies change the world. Here, you’ll work alongside pioneers of AI, solving problems that matter: making AI more transparent, more ethical, and more empowering. As your skills grow, our career framework provides a pathway and recognition of that increased impact.

Opportunities aren’t limited by geography. You’ll collaborate with global experts, contribute to open source projects that power the world’s technology, and stretch your skills daily. That global perspective and diversity makes our solution more universal and robust. We are committed to continuing to celebrate diversity on our team.

Supported people are successful people. We offer 100% employer paid medical premiums for employees and self-managed PTO with a minimum time off requirement, so that our teams are able to do their best work.

We invest in curiosity, creativity, and ownership. That means you’ll be trusted to boldly innovate, supported to learn fast, and celebrated for successful collaboration.

Commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging

OpenTeams understands that valuing diverse creative practices and forms of knowledge is crucial to and enriches the company’s core mission. We encourage applications from everyone, including members of all equity-seeking communities, such as (but certainly not limited to) women, racialized and Indigenous persons, disabled people, persons of all sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions.

We are an equal opportunity employer - all qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for recruitment, interviews, employment, training, compensation, promotion, and related activities. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, gender, gender identity, gender expression, color, national origin, pregnancy, ancestry, domestic partner status, disability, sexual orientation, age, genetic predisposition, medical condition, marital status, citizenship status, military or veteran status, or any other basis covered by applicable laws. OpenTeams will not tolerate discrimination or harassment based on these characteristics or any other unlawful behavior, conduct, or purpose.