Principal Architect, AI Labs
$197k - $365k • Remote • California - San Francisco
Posted 5d ago
Job Location
California - San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
AI Labs at Salesforce is seeking deeply technical, product-savvy AI architects to evaluate AI technology for potential acquisitions and investments, and to accelerate portfolio companies post-acquisition. These leaders will provide technical depth during M&A diligence and help build common AI capabilities, models, and infrastructure that can be leveraged by acquired companies. The role involves assessing the technical viability of companies, identifying risks and opportunities, and advising on build-vs-buy decisions and the defensibility of underlying technology.
Responsibilities
- Lead technical and AI diligence for potential acquisitions and strategic investments.
- Critically evaluate architecture, models, data strategy, infrastructure, security, scalability, technical differentiation, and technical debt.
- Interview and score DeepTech talent.
- Assess build-vs-buy questions and the defensibility of a company's underlying technology, team, and IP.
- Partner directly with founders, CTOs, and engineering leaders during diligence.
- Identify material technical risks and opportunities and translate them into clear recommendations.
- Identify opportunities for portfolio companies to adopt shared AI technologies, evaluation frameworks, infrastructure, standards, and services.
- Identify capabilities that should be built once across AI Labs, rather than repeatedly by individual companies.
- Serve as a senior technical advisor across the AI Labs portfolio.
Requirements
- Principal/Distinguished-level engineering or architecture experience in AI (both basic and applied), ML, and production-scale AI products.
- Deep understanding of modern AI architectures, models, training/post-training and inference, data, evaluation, infrastructure, and production systems.
- Ability to rapidly understand unfamiliar technical stacks and distinguish true technical differentiation from implementation detail.
- Experience working with startup/founder-led engineering teams.
- Strong technical judgment combined with deep product taste and pragmatic business thinking.
- Experience with technical diligence, DeepTech investing, acquisitions, or startup evaluation is a plus.