Sr Principal Architect, Data & AI

POSITION TITLE: Sr. Principal Architect – Data & AI (P6)

For more than three decades, Crown Castle has led the way in shared communications infrastructure, delivering profitable solutions by connecting communities, businesses, and people, and enabling each to thrive with reliable access to voice and data in more places, faster than ever before. When you join Crown Castle, you become part of a dynamic team of passionate and collaborative professionals engaging in complex challenges and contributing to projects that shape the future of life and work.
ABOUT THE ROLE
For more than three decades, Crown Castle has led the way in shared communications infrastructure, delivering profitable solutions by connecting communities, businesses, and people, and enabling each to thrive with reliable access to voice and data in more places, faster than ever before. When you join Crown Castle, you become part of a dynamic team of passionate and collaborative professionals engaging in complex challenges and contributing to projects that shape the future of life and work.

ABOUT THE ROLE
The Senior Principal Architect – Data & AI is the organization’s most senior hands-on technical authority for modern data platforms, AI, machine learning infrastructure, and cloud-native data engineering, defining the enterprise technical vision while personally designing, coding, testing, deploying, optimizing, and troubleshooting critical capabilities. Operating from executive strategy through production implementation, and operating at speed, this individual will work across architecture, data engineering and pipelines, machine-learning systems, infrastructure, software, security controls, and performance engineering, rather than serving primarily in an advisory or governance capacity. The architect will establish engineering standards and patterns, validate them through working implementations, and lead the most complex technical work across data foundations, data engineering, data models and semantic layers, advanced analytics, AI and ML, automation, and Data and AI governance.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

• Define and evolve the enterprise architecture and technical roadmap for data platforms, AI, machine learning infrastructure, and cloud-native data engineering.
• Serve as the organization’s highest-level hands-on technical authority, making critical design decisions across data, AI & ML, infrastructure, data integration, security, availability, observability, and deployment.
• Personally design, prototype, code, test, deploy, optimize, and troubleshoot production-grade data pipelines, infrastructure, and AI and ML capabilities.
• Establish architectural principles, reference architectures, engineering standards, reusable frameworks, and development patterns that improve delivery speed, quality, consistency, and maintainability.
• Translate complex business and scientific problems into secure, scalable, high-performing technical architectures and working production solutions, in short time frames.
• Evaluate architecture and technology alternatives through research, quantitative analysis, benchmarking, proofs of concept, and production prototypes.
• Define and implement enterprise data architecture across ingestion, transformation, storage, processing, governance, analytics, semantic layers, AI-ready data, and operational consumption.
• Provide deep technical leadership for Databricks, Apache Spark, lakehouse architecture, PostgreSQL, data modeling, data products, and batch, streaming, event-driven, and real-time data pipelines.
• Establish DataOps practices covering version control, orchestration, automated testing, data quality, metadata, lineage, observability, environment promotion, rollback, and incident response.
• Architect and implement end-to-end AI and ML systems spanning data preparation, experimentation, training, evaluation, deployment, inference, monitoring, retraining, and governance.
• Architect and implement secure, scalable Agentic AI systems, including agent frameworks and harnesses, orchestration, tool and data integration, memory and context management, evaluation, observability, governance, human oversight, and controls for reliable production operation.
• Design MLOps capabilities that provide model reproducibility, versioning, lineage, evaluation, explain ability, security, performance monitoring, drift detection, and operational support.
• Architect secure cloud environments and containerized workloads using Kubernetes and Docker, with repeatable infrastructure provisioned through Terraform and Infrastructure as Code.
• Build GitHub-based engineering workflows and CI/CD pipelines that automate building, testing, security scanning, packaging, provisioning, deployment, validation, monitoring, and rollback.
• Embed security, privacy, compliance, resilience, and responsible-AI controls throughout software, infrastructure, data, model, and deployment lifecycles.
• Establish comprehensive automated-testing and quality-engineering practices across code, infrastructure, data pipelines, integrations, security controls, ML models, and production deployments.
• Lead technical investigations and resolve the organization’s most difficult architecture, performance, reliability, data-quality, security, and production challenges.
• Identify and drive resolution of technical debt, systemic risks, architectural gaps, performance constraints, and deficiencies in engineering capability.
• Develop data engineers, AI engineers, data scientists, and analytics engineers through mentoring, pairing, design and code reviews, technical standards, and direct knowledge transfer.
• Influence enterprise strategy, investments, platform roadmaps, vendor decisions, and sourcing while ensuring strategic partners deliver within company-defined architecture, engineering, security, and quality standards.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED TO SUCCEED
Education Qualifications

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, Physics, Computational Science, or another highly quantitative discipline.
• Doctorate in a relevant quantitative or computational discipline strongly preferred.

Experience Qualifications

• 15 or more years’ experience with a Masters, or 13 or more years’ experience with a PhD, of progressively advanced experience across software engineering, data engineering, distributed systems, cloud platforms, AI and ML, high-performance computing, and related disciplines.
• Significant experience serving as a Chief or equivalent architect or engineer for enterprise-scale production environments.
• Excellent technical problem solver, able to solve very complex problems in a short period of time.
• Demonstrated history of personally building and operating sophisticated production systems, not solely directing teams or producing architecture documentation.
• Experience defining technical direction across multiple engineering domains and influencing decisions at senior leadership levels.
• Proven success taking complex capabilities from research, concept, or prototype through secure production operation.
• Experience leading technically across organizational boundaries without relying primarily on formal reporting authority.
• Expert software engineering skills in multiple languages and frameworks.
• Experience directing and holding strategic partners or managed-service providers accountable to internally defined technical standards.

Organizational Relationship

Reports to:  Director of Engineering – AI, Data, Analytics, and Governance 

Title(s) of direct reports (if applicable): TBD

Where You Will Work
To optimize collaboration, relationship building, and key stakeholder engagement, this roles aligns to a 4:1 hybrid model which is in office Monday-Thursday with the option for remote work on Fridays. 
Additional Considerations
At Crown Castle, we do our best to ensure you have access to the resources you need to live a healthy and happy life no matter where you are in life. Our benefits are built around your individual needs, covering physical, mental, and financial health and designed to enhance your quality of life.
We are proud to offer a full suite of health and wealth benefits for you and your loved ones. Below are a few of the key highlights of the many benefits we provide.

• Comprehensive healthcare plans with highly company subsidized premiums and up to $2,000 annual company contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA base plan for employee and dependents).
• Market-leading 401(k) plan, which includes up to 10% company contributions through our 5% match and 5% profit sharing program (based on employee contributions).
• New-child leave up to 8 weeks of 100% paid leave upon birth or legal adoption of a new child. Birth mothers are eligible for up to 8 weeks of additional 100% paid medical leave.
• Tuition reimbursement up to $5,250 per year of eligible tuition and fees.
• Crown Castle scholarship program awarding up to $10,000 per recipient each year for eligible dependent children of employees and interns.
• Matching charitable contributions to qualified charitable organizations of up to $1,000 per year per teammate.
• Generous paid time-off for eligible full-time employees (minimum 18 days per year based on years of service).
• 10 company holidays plus 2 floating holiday.
• All offices provide free beverages and snacks.

A candidate's offer is determined by various factors including but not limited to, depth of experience, role-related knowledge and skills, relevant education or training, internal alignment, and work location. 
If you are interested in joining our team, please visit the to apply. We do not accept resumes from agencies, headhunters, or other third-party suppliers who have not signed a formal agreement with us. This position will remain posted until filled.