Forward-Deployed AI Architect

About the role

A hands-on Forward-Deployed AI Architect is sought to lead the technical delivery of an AI-assisted operations platform for an enterprise client in travel disruption management. The current phase covers three connected workflows: processing and routing service requests, ranking and recommending hotels, and closing cases with billing reconciliation and downstream system handoff. The role is technical leadership, working with operational experts, the client's technology partners and engineers, from discovery through implementation and evaluation.

Key responsibilities

• Establish an evidence-based technical baseline by inspecting code, infrastructure, APIs and operator workflows, then write concise specifications with inputs, outputs, exclusions, acceptance tests and source references.
• Make integration work early by building and reviewing critical components, proving a thin end-to-end path in the client's test environment and verifying API access, write capabilities, event contracts and error paths.
• Design a clear separation between operational facts, business policies and software logic, with named business owners defining rule precedence, exceptions, validation and approval; keep draft rules separate from approved ones and support versioned updates with historical replay and rollback.
• Own engineering quality and evaluation: review and test code (including AI-generated code), set up automated CI checks, integration tests and representative operational cases, track application, rule and data versions, and implement decision logs, monitoring, access controls and failure recovery.
• Define test-readiness evidence and agree workflow quality, latency and operating-cost measures with the team and client.
• Maintain a concise architecture and decision record, raise blockers early with evidence and an owner, propose simpler alternatives, and leave the team with maintainable code, documentation and a practical handover.

Required profile

• Evidence of taking an applied AI or LLM-enabled workflow beyond a prototype into operational use.
• Strong hands-on software engineering, architecture, API integration and code-review skills.
• Experience turning incomplete or conflicting discovery material into implementable, testable specifications.
• Sound judgment about structured rules, retrieval, AI reasoning and human review, including their failure modes.
• Confidence to challenge assumptions, explain alternatives and escalate decisions constructively across business and engineering teams.
• Clear, concise communication and realistic estimation based on verified dependencies and available capacity.

Required skills

• Software engineering, architecture and API integration
• CI and production observability
• Nice to have: experience in exception-heavy operations, business-rule systems, travel, hospitality or logistics; familiarity with AWS-based AI deployments

The role includes an in-person working session in Milan; candidates should share their earliest start date, realistic weekly availability and ability to travel.