Principal Architect

Do you enjoy working with large scale AI systems?
Would having an impact on the performance and quality of AI infrastructure and applications excite you?
Join our exceptional technical team!
Our AI team's mission is to deliver industry-leading solutions across the AI stack: GPU and agent infrastructure, applications, and serverless inference. Performance, scalability, and cost-effectiveness are critical to every product and internal application we build.
Shape the future of our cutting-edge products
As Principal Architect, you will develop software and systems for evaluating and optimizing the performance of real-world AI applications.
As a Principal Architect, you will be responsible for:
Identifying AI models of interest in various domains (LLMs, imaging, video, voice, etc.)
Packaging the software systems for deployment in various systems (Akamai-internal systems and third-party inference platforms)
Deploying the software systems, as well as managing that deployment
Identifying benchmarks that yield relevant and actionable insight into the performance and cost-effectiveness of each of the model/platform combinations
Running the selected benchmarks to produce comparison data between the various model/platform combinations
Optimizing the configuration and runtime systems of various models to improve benchmark metrics over time
Researching and developing reference configurations for new technologies such as MCP servers, agentic frameworks, caching, distributed inference, etc
Do what you love
To be successful in this role you will:
Have 15 years or more of relevant experience and Bachelors degree in computer science, or related field
Demonstrate experience in development large scale software systems
Demonstrate experience with AI applications such as inference engines, clustering systems, and agentic frameworks
Demonstrate experience in benchmarking AI systems across a range of metrics
Possess working knowledge of distributed systems
Have experience in software development life cycle including in the Unix/Linux environment
Have a good understanding of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS with experience in one or more public cloud offerings.
About us
At Akamai, we make life better for billions of people, trillions of times a day.
Whether you're streaming live events, scrolling social media, watching your favorite series, or managing your savings, we're the engine behind the scenes. We provide the world's most distributed platform from Cloud to Edge to help the giants of the digital world work faster and stay more secure, making the internet a better experience for everyone.
Our focus is simple:
Cloud and Edge: Running apps closer to users for instant performance.
Security: Neutralizing threats before they ever reach your data.
Content Delivery: Scaling the world's biggest moments without a glitch.
AI: Enabling our customers to build, secure, and scale AI apps on the world's most distributed cloud platform.
At Akamai, we don't just support the internet; we power and protect it, because behind every great digital experience is a massive hidden challenge. And we're the ones who solve it. When millions of people hit play or pay, Akamai ensures it just works.
Benefits at Akamai: We support your health, well-being, finances, and life beyond work. See our benefits.
FlexBase adapts to your job's needs
Akamai's FlexBase program is yet another way we show our commitment to providing employees with an exceptional workplace experience. It's not about telling employees where to work; it's about supporting employees to do their best work.
We trust our incredible employees to work in ways that suit them best: at home, in an office, or a combination of both.
Connect with us on social and see what life at Akamai is like!
Compensation
Akamai is committed to fair and equitable compensation practices. For US based candidates only - the base salary for this position ranges from $200,000 - $360,000/year; a candidate’s salary is determined by various factors including, but not limited to, relevant work experience, skills, certifications and location. Compensation for candidates outside the US will vary. The compensation package may also include incentive compensation opportunities in the form of annual bonus or incentives, equity awards and an Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP). Akamai provides industry-leading benefits including healthcare, 401K savings plan, company holidays, vacation (in the form of PTO), sick time, family friendly benefits including parental leave and an employee assistance program including a focus on mental and financial wellness; Eligibility requirements apply.

Work arrangement
Yes