Sr. Director, Architecture and AI
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About the role
The Role:
iA is looking for a Sr. Director, Architecture and AI to lead enterprise-wide architectural transformation across the organization. This is a hands-on leadership role for someone who has modernized legacy monolithic systems, brings an AI-first mindset, and can translate technical strategy into practical, scalable solutions in a fast-paced growth environment.
In this role, you will set architectural direction while staying close to the work — partnering with engineers, reviewing designs, shaping governance, and contributing to reference implementations and prototypes that move the organization forward. You will help decompose iA’s long-standing .NET/VB6 monolith into modern, scalable services while introducing AI-native architecture, disciplined AI governance, and production-ready AI capabilities across the company.
You will also provide leadership for iA’s cloud-based Enterprise Analytics & Insights platform and serve as a key connector between software, data, AI, and hardware teams. Success in this role will be measured by the business and customer outcomes modernization enables — including improved scalability, operational efficiency, product velocity, and long-term growth.
What you’ll do:
Support Monolith Modernization & Services Architecture
- Lead the strategy and execution for modernizing the .NET/VB6 monolith into scalable, independently deployable services while balancing business continuity, technical risk, and delivery pace.
- Lead the definition of target-state architecture, service boundaries, data ownership, and integration patterns, translating architectural strategy into working reference implementations and prototypes.
- Lead strategic trade-off decisions across build vs. buy, rewrite vs. wrap, and speed vs. architectural rigor, clearly connecting recommendations to business impact.
AI-First Architecture & Scalable AI Practices
- Set the architectural direction for AI-first service design, embedding AI capabilities into core logic, workflows, and decision points rather than treating them as downstream enhancements.
- Establish a scalable AI practice for iA, including reusable patterns, shared infrastructure, and reference architectures that accelerate consistent, enterprise-wide AI adoption.
- Serve as a member of the Core AI Governance team with responsibility for end-to-end governance of production AI systems, including model risk, data privacy, human-in-the-loop controls, evaluation, monitoring, safety guardrails, and issue response.
Agentic Interfaces for Developer & QA Productivity
- Lead the architecture, development, and scaling of production-grade AI agents, bringing hands-on expertise in agent orchestration, tool use and permissioning, memory and context management, cost and latency optimization, and failure handling.
- Set technical standards for production AI agents, including orchestration, tool use and permissioning, memory and context management, cost and latency optimization, and failure handling at scale.
- Establish governance and operational practices for evaluating, monitoring, and safely rolling back agents in production, ensuring productivity gains do not compromise code quality, security, or reliability.
- Advance agentic tooling as an enterprise capability, creating reusable patterns that scale developer and QA productivity gains across teams.
NEXiA Platform Scaling — PoDs, SSP, MDS
- Lead AI-enabled scaling strategies for iA’s PoDs, SSP, and MDS within the NEXiA platform, improving throughput, reliability, and operational efficiency as platform usage grows.
- Ensure scaling strategies for PoDs, SSP, and MDS are informed by hardware dependencies, physical system constraints, and operational requirements across the NEXiA platform.
Customer Lifecycle Metrics — Land, Adopt, Expand, Retain
- Use Land, Adopt, Expand, and Retention (LAER) metrics to guide architecture and AI investment decisions, ensuring technical priorities are directly tied to measurable customer adoption, expansion, retention, and business growth.
- Land: Accelerate onboarding and initial implementation through AI-enabled workflows that shorten time-to-first-value for new customers.
- Adopt: Increase feature and workflow adoption by using AI and agentic tooling to surface next-best actions for customers and internal teams.
- Expand: Use AI-informed signals to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, ensuring platform architecture supports growth without significant rework.
- Retain: Apply AI-driven early warning signals to identify churn risk, reliability concerns, or performance issues before they become customer-facing problems.
- Translate architecture and AI initiatives into LAER-based business narratives for executives and PE sponsors, showing how technical investments drive customer adoption, expansion, retention, and growth.
Hands-On Technical & People Leadership
- Provide hands-on technical leadership through production code contributions, pull request reviews, architecture spikes, and proof-of-concept development that validates architectural direction.
- Influence strategic decisions through technical credibility, data-informed recommendations, and working prototypes that demonstrate feasibility and business impact.
- Lead and unify a 6–10-person team of architects and engineers across multiple R&D teams around shared architecture and AI standards, while balancing team-specific priorities, constraints, and delivery needs.
- Build, mentor, and mature an architecture and AI engineering bench that can sustain and scale modernization, AI-first architecture, and agentic tooling capabilities across the company.
Enterprise Analytics & Insights Platform (Cloud)
- Own the architecture and strategic roadmap for iA’s cloud-based Enterprise Analytics & Insights platform, ensuring data quality, platform scalability, and AI/agentic capabilities are aligned across the teams that build and operate it.
- Align the platform’s architecture with the broader modernization strategy to ensure consistent technical direction across the enterprise.
- Use the platform to define, validate, and scale reusable AI-first patterns, including insight generation, anomaly detection, and agentic analytics, that can be adopted across the enterprise.
Partnership with Hardware Teams
- Lead architectural alignment between software, AI, and hardware teams, ensuring system designs account for hardware dependencies, integration points, and physical constraints.
- Identify and lead AI and agentic opportunities within hardware-adjacent workflows, including operational monitoring and scaling decisions for PoDs, SSP, and MDS across the NEXiA platform.
- Lead cross-functional alignment between software and hardware teams, ensuring architecture decisions reflect full-system trade-offs across software, hardware, integration, and operational constraints.
Who you are:
- 15+ years in software architecture and engineering leadership, including direct, hands-on ownership of large-scale system modernization.
- Demonstrated success leading the modernization of legacy monolithic applications, including .NET, VB6, or comparable legacy stacks, into scalable, modern services architectures.
- Deep, working knowledge of LLMs and agentic AI systems, including how they are architected, deployed, evaluated, secured, and scaled in production environments.
- Leadership of production AI agent initiatives, including agentic developer and QA tooling such as code generation, automated test generation, code review, or migration agents.
- Background owning or architecting cloud-based enterprise analytics, insights, or data platforms at company-wide scale
- Experience applying Land, Adopt, Expand, and Retention (LAER) or comparable customer-lifecycle metrics to connect data, AI, and product strategy with customer adoption, expansion, retention, and business growth.
- Proven ability to lead, develop, and align mid-sized engineering and architecture teams across multiple product or functional areas.
- Proven ability to lead across software and hardware/physical systems, including shared architecture decisions and technical trade-offs.
- Experience in a growth-equity environment where technical decisions are explicitly tied to value creation and exit outcomes.
- Track record of making complex technical and business trade-offs and communicating decisions clearly to engineering and executive audiences.
Even better if you have:
- Experience with platforms similar in nature to NEXiA — high-throughput operational systems with distributed processing units and service scaling demands.
- Background bridging enterprise IT and R&D, having driven transformation across an organization rather than within a single function.
- Familiarity with regulatory or compliance-heavy environments where AI safety and governance carry real operational stakes.
- Direct experience building internal developer-productivity or QA platforms and measuring their adoption and impact.
Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. Employer will not sponsor applicants for work visas.
Compensation:
The estimated base annual salary range for this position is $212,500.00 to $287,500.00, though a candidate’s base annual salary shall be determined on a range of factors, including, but not limited to, qualifications and experience. This position may additionally be eligible for an annual discretionary bonus.
What are the perks?
- Generous time off policy that allows you to put your family first
- Opportunity to work on the cutting edge of pharmacy automation in a high growth tech company
- Competitive benefits, salary, and talent development opportunities
- Commitment to professional development and working for a company where your voice is heard
More about iA:
iA® (Innovation Associates®) is a pharmacy fulfillment company that provides an integrated platform of capabilities to support Centralized and Community Pharmacy Fulfillment Solutions. With over 30 years of experience in the pharmacy fulfillment business, we have developed and implemented a suite of automation and software solutions that help deliver quick and sustainable business results. Our integrated Pharmacy Fulfillment Platform enables scalable solutions that helps run the prescription fulfillment process from prescription acceptance to delivery, supporting dynamic design flexibility to service pharmacies in a variety of volumes and settings. Our solutions improve workflow, and increase efficiency, while enabling more time for pharmacists to focus on their patients. iA works with pharmacy providers in the Commercial, Health Systems, Government, and Mail Order/eCommerce markets. iA can help customers transform their pharmacy. For more information, visit iARx.com.
Our Mission: We partner with providers to transform pharmacy through our leading-edge software enabled fulfillment technology and partners to deepen the patient-pharmacist relationship, enhancing patient safety and choice while increasing operational efficiency. iA empowers pharmacists to focus on patient care. iA can run the prescription fulfillment process from start to finish, helping pharmacies manage fulfillment and inventory to help lower costs, improve efficiency, increase safety, and provide comprehensive Rx tracking and real-time support.
Our Products:
- Software
- Modular Hardware
- Sophisticated Counting and Collation Devices
Our Core Values:
- Solutions Driven
- Customer Centric
- Championing Diversity
- Empowering Ownership
- Trust Daringly
To learn more about iA’s product, people and culture visit us at iARx.com OR check us out on LinkedIn, Facebook, or YouTube!
iA provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.
This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.
#LI-DNI
Description sourced from the public Indeed listing — this role isn't indexed from the company's career page yet.
Skills
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- Python
- Go
- Rust
- Java
- C#
- SQL
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Terraform
- GitHub Actions
- MLflow
- Hugging Face
- LangChain
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