Role Overview

We are looking for a Principal Architect, Data & AI/ML who is equally comfortable whiteboarding an enterprise data strategy and rolling up their sleeves to write production-grade code, design reference architectures, and mentor delivery teams. This is a hands-on leadership role that sits at the intersection of data engineering, machine learning engineering, and solution architecture.

You will serve as the technical anchor across client engagements — owning architecture decisions end-to-end, driving pre-sales pursuits, and building reusable accelerators that amplify the practice's delivery capability. The ideal candidate has deep expertise across the full data & AI/ML value chain — from data foundations to decision intelligence.

Key Responsibilities

Solution Architecture & Technical Leadership
- Design and own end-to-end reference architectures for data platforms, lakehouses, AI/ML pipelines, and GenAI products across multi-cloud environments (AWS, Azure, GCP).
- Lead architecture reviews, proof-of-concepts, and technical due-diligence for client engagements.




- Define architectural principles, design patterns, and guardrails for the practice; contribute to CriticalRiver's internal IP and accelerator library.
- Translate business requirements into scalable, cost-optimised, and secure technical blueprints.

Generative AI & LLM-Ops
- Architect and build enterprise-grade Generative AI solutions using large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), vector databases, and AI agents.
- Design LLM-Ops pipelines covering fine-tuning, prompt engineering, evaluation harnesses, guardrails, and model observability.
- Enable "no-data" and "agents-on-data" patterns — embedding AI agents into structured data workflows and decision processes.

Data Engineering & Integration
- Architect up-to-date data integration pipelines: batch, micro-batch, and real-time; ELT/ETL on cloud-native platforms.
- Lead lakehouse and warehouse modernisation engagements —

📌 Practice Architect – Data (Hyderabad)
🏢 CriticalRiver
📍 Hyderabad