Sr AI Architect - Conversational AI

Who we are At Twilio, we’re shaping the future of communications, all from the comfort of our homes. We deliver innovative solutions to hundreds of thousands of businesses and empower millions of developers worldwide to craft personalized customer experiences. Our dedication to remote-first work, and strong culture of connection and global inclusion means that no matter your location, you’re part of a vibrant team with diverse experiences making a global impact each day. As we continue to revolutionize how the world interacts, we’re acquiring new skills and experiences that make work feel truly rewarding. Your career at Twilio is in your hands. . Hiring and how we work We use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make our hiring process efficient. That said, every hiring decision is made by real Twilions! Also, while we are a remote-first company, you may be asked to report in person on an ad-hoc basis for team gatherings, functional off-sites or customer meetings. . See yourself at Twilio Join the team as Twilio’s next Sr AI Architect - Conversation AI. About the job This position is critical to leveraging Twilio’s massive data ecosystem and unmatched communication scale to build our customer facing AI capabilities, such as Twilio Conversational Memory, Enterprise Knowledge, Behavioral Data Intelligence and many more to power the future of our customer engagement platform. As a Sr. AI Architect for Twilio Platform, you will also influence the design and evolution of our company-wide ML/AI Ops foundation. You will set the long-term technical vision, establish architectural guardrails, and ensure strict adherence to responsible AI principles. You will drive cross-organizational initiatives, solve complex technical challenges, and elevate the technical standards across all of Twilio. Transitioning AI/ML concepts from cutting-edge research to resilient, compliant, and cost-effective production systems will be your core mission. As a Sr AI Architect, you will lead the company as the Distinguished Engineer and AI Contextual Engineering SME, serving as the guiding authority to our Architects, driving company-wide impact, and steering Twilio's overarching technical direction for conversational AI. In this pivotal leadership role, you will also influence the design and evolution of our company-wide ML/AI Ops foundation. You will set the long-term technical vision, establish architectural guardrails, and ensure strict adherence to responsible AI principles. By driving cross-organizational initiatives and solving complex technical challenges, you will elevate the technical standards across all of Twilio. Transitioning AI/ML concepts from cutting-edge research to resilient, compliant, and cost-effective production systems will be your core mission. Responsibilities In this role, you’ll: • Define and drive a long-term AI/ML architectural vision that aligns with Twilio’s business goals, specifically focusing on how data and memory power the next generation of customer engagement. • Own the strategic roadmap for Twilio’s ML/AI Ops platform and tooling, ensuring a unified approach to model development, deployment, and lifecycle management across all platform capabilities. • Evaluate and implement modern LLM architectures, RAG systems, MCP/tooling frameworks, and inference optimization techniques. • Lead architecture for agentic AI systems including orchestration, reasoning, tool usage, and contextual grounding. • Stay current with rapidly evolving advancements in LLMs, agent frameworks, reasoning systems, and AI infrastructure. • Transition seamlessly from high-level strategic communication with executives to deep-dive code reviews and pair programming with engineers. • Partner closely with Product Management to turn a roadmap into a sequence of technical milestones, ensuring that technical investments always map to customer value. • Have a 'player-coach' mentality, and contribute hands-on technical expertise while providing strategic direction and mentorship to the team. Qualifications Twilio values diverse experiences from all kinds of industries, and we encourage everyone who meets the required qualifications to apply. If your career is just starting or hasn't followed a traditional path, don't let that stop you from considering Twilio. We are always looking for people who will bring something new to the table! Required: • 15+ years of experience in software engineering, with at least 6+ years specifically focused on building and scaling production-grade ML systems at a platform level. • Extensive experience with ML Ops and LLM Ops patterns, including designing and implementing rigorous evaluation metrics, automated retraining loops, and monitoring for non-deterministic AI features at scale. • Deep expertise in the design, architecture, and deployment of production-grade ML/AI systems, including deep knowledge of transformer models, LLM orchestration, embedding models, inference optimization and vector stores. • Deep understanding of the Context Engineering lifecycle, including semantic retrieval, contextual compression, state management across multi-turn conversations. • Strong background in building cloud-based services using AWS, GCP, or Azure, with experience managing high-volume data and various data stores. • Exceptional communication and collaboration skills, with a proven ability to mentor engineers, influence company wide technical strategy, product direction, and drive results across the company. • A Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, Statistics, or a closely related quantitative field. Desired • A track record of relevant publications at top ML conferences or significant open-source contributions. • Experience designing evaluation frameworks that specifically measure context quality • Track record of designing and implementing enterprise-scale ML/AI Ops platforms • Experience working in a geographically distribute