Applied AI Architect - Austin, TX

Trend Micro, a global cybersecurity leader, helps make the world safe for exchanging digital information across enterprises, governments, and consumers.

Fueled by decades of security expertise, global threat research, and continuous innovation, Trend harnesses AI to protect organizations and individuals across clouds, networks, devices, and endpoints.

The Trend Vision One™ enterprise cybersecurity platform accelerates proactive security outcomes by predicting and preventing threats across the entire digital estate and environments like AWS, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA.

Proactive security starts here.  TrendMicro.com

Location: This is a hybrid role based out of our Austin, TX office and requires in-office presence three days a week.

Position Summary:

Trend Micro is seeking an Applied AI Architect with deep experience bridging LLM/SLM model research and enterprise productization. You will lead the technical direction from model architecture selection, fine-tuning, and optimization to deployment and observability, shaping the next generation of agentic AI for cybersecurity. This role demands both foundational knowledge and production practicality — designing and validating novel approaches, then translating them into reliable, scalable solutions deployed in Trend Vision One platform.

What You Will Be Doing:

• Drive research-to-production of LLM/SLM systems — from design and fine-tuning to evaluation, deployment, and continual adaptation in enterprise agent workflows.

• Lead technical choices — determine when to apply context engineering, prompt tuning, continued pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, reasoning fine-tuning, LoRA, or RL.

• Architect high-performance inference and serving using vLLM, NVIDIA NIM, Triton, CUDA, or other optimized frameworks.

• Integrate reinforcement learning frameworks (veRL, SkyRL, PyTorch, Ray RLlib) to enhance reasoning, adaptability, and agent feedback loops.

• Develop and operationalize AI Ops pipelines — build benchmarks and metrics for model evaluation, observability, drift detection, and lifecycle automation.

• Advance agent interoperability using A2A (Agent-to-Agent) or MCP (Model Context Protocol) for large-scale coordination.

• Collaborate with cybersecurity researchers to embed threat reasoning, anomaly detection, and defensive logic directly into model behavior.

• Publish, document, and codify reusable AI blueprints for hybrid (cloud + on-prem) deployments and future research acceleration.

What We Need to See:

• Proven end-to-end experience bringing LLM/SLM research into production — from fine-tuning and inference optimization to evaluation and AI Ops integration. Excellent knowledge of at least one of the following:

  • Deep understanding of data-model-infrastructure trade-offs and optimization under real business constraints.

  • Hands-on experience fine-tuning LLMs using frameworks such as LLaMA Factory, NeMo, and PEFT (e.g., LoRA)

  • Strong knowledge of GPU-accelerated inference (ex: vLLM, NIM, Triton, CUDA, NCCL, PyTorch/XLA).

  • Familiarity with AI Ops toolchains (ex: Weights & Biases, MLflow, Ray Serve).

• Proficiency in Python, and experience building containerized AI microservices (ex: Docker, Kubernetes, Ray).

• 8+ years of software engineering or research engineering experience, including the most recent 3 years focused on applied AI/ML and deploying LLM/SLM systems in production at enterprise scale.

• Proven experience as a Senior technical lead or architect, driving end‑to‑end design, roadmap decisions, and productization of AI systems.

• Deep expertise in cloud-native architecture across AWS, Azure, or GCP

• Experience in mentoring senior engineers, reviewing technical designs, and establishing engineering best practices

Ways to Stand Out:

• Demonstrated success in building scalable infrastructure and launching LLM/SLM-based features and agent systems within enterprise platforms.

• Expertise in quantization, distillation, or GPU profiling to lower inference cost.

• Clear conceptual understanding of when to fine-tune vs prompt-engineer vs use RLHF — and evidence of having applied each effectively.

• Familiarity with agentic frameworks (LangChain, AWS Strands, AutoGen, etc).

• Deep understanding of A2A/MCP protocols for interoperable multi-agent systems.

Mindset Requirements:

• Research-driven yet delivery-focused — capable of balancing innovation with practical deployment.

• Data- and results-oriented — every hypothesis must be measurable.

• Ownership mentality — from exploration and experiment to evaluation, optimization, and monitoring.

• Passionate about turning AI research into defensible, intelligent, and proactive cybersecurity systems.

Why Join Trend Micro?

Trend Micro is a leader in AI security. We not only delivered the first open-weight, cybersecurity-focused large language model, but also the industry’s first security companion agent evaluated directly by customers. Trend Vision One integrates endpoint, cloud, network, email, identity, AI application, and data security into a single, unified platform. In this role, you will partner with business leaders to design systems that can reason, learn, and protect—accelerating agility, speed of delivery, and data-centric security. You will help transform cutting-edge research into real-world defense capabilities, protecting millions of users in the generative-AI agent era and enabling enterprises to stay ahead of evolving threats.

What We Offer You:

You're important to us. What matters to you, matters to us too. Trend Micro provides benefit options for you and your family.

• Comprehensive medical, dental and vision insurance

• Life insurance

• Short & Long Term Disability 

• Pre-partum, maternity, parental and medical leave

• Mental Health Wellness Program

• Adoption Assistance

• Wellness Incentive

• Pet Insurance

• 401(k) with company match

• Paid Time Off

• 14 Annual Holidays

• Tuition Assistance

• Employee Resource Groups

We offer competitive compensation with bonus opportunity tied to company performance, along with room to enhance your skills through ongoing learning and broad technological opportunities. Achieving work-life balance is a priority, complemented by team activities, fostering an environment rooted in equity, inclusion, and collaboration, that is reflected in both our culture and our work.

Be Passionate. Be Innovative. Be a Trender.

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