Lead AI Architect - Data Platform

Banyan Software acquires and grows specialized software businesses while providing shared AI expertise and operational support. The company is hiring its first Lead AI Architect to design, build, and operate a centralized AWS data and AI platform, establish secure architecture and experimentation standards, and eventually lead a small platform team. The role partners with business analysts and functional leaders to deliver governed data, AI use cases, reliability, and adoption across the organization.

Responsibilities:

• Define and own the target-state data and AI architecture for Banyan. Make the trade-offs explicit and write them down
• Design and build the AWS-centric data lake. Set the patterns for storage, cataloging, query, ingestion, modeling, and lineage. Likely stack: S3, Glue, Lake Formation, Athena, Redshift, Iceberg or similar open table formats, plus Terraform or CDK for infrastructure as code
• Stand up the AI experimentation layer: model access via Anthropic, OpenAI and other LLM
• Establish data contracts, schema standards, naming conventions, and a domain model that holds up as we add sources and acquire companies
• Partner with our Senior Business Analysts embedded in Finance, M&A, and Business Development to translate use cases into platform requirements and to unblock their work
• Define security, privacy, and AI safety guardrails. Classify data, design access tiering, and set the rules for handling PII, regulated data, and confidential portfolio information
• Stay hands-on. Write code, ship infrastructure, run code reviews, and debug production issues. Architects who do not build lose touch
• Build the team including vertical aligned Senior Business AI Analysts. Find suitable contractors for data platform engineers, ML platform engineers, and data engineers. Mentor them. Set the bar for engineering quality
• Own platform reliability, observability, and cost. Set SLOs, monitor usage, and keep the bill rational as we scale
• Represent Banyan's AI and data architecture to our executive team, our portfolio companies, and external partners