Principal Architect - AI

Costco Wholesale It Family

Costco IT is responsible for the technical future of Costco Wholesale, the third largest retailer in the world with wholesale operations in fourteen countries. Despite our size and explosive international expansion, we continue to provide a family, employee centric atmosphere in which our employees thrive and succeed.

This is an environment unlike anything in the high-tech world and the secret of Costco's success is its culture. The value Costco puts on its employees is well documented in articles from a variety of publishers including Bloomberg and Forbes. Our employees and our members come first. Costco is well known for its generosity and community service and has won many awards for its philanthropy. The company joins with its employees to take an active role in volunteering by sponsoring many opportunities to help others.

Come join the Costco Wholesale IT family. Costco IT is a dynamic, fast-paced environment, working through exciting transformation efforts. We are building the next generation retail environment where you will be surrounded by dedicated and highly professional employees.

Costco's Enterprise Architecture team propels our business by blueprinting an innovative, scalable, and secure architecture that serves our Warehouse members globally with years to come. Enterprise Architects work with leadership, stakeholders, and subject matter experts to build a holistic view of the organization's value streams, goals, strategies, capabilities, processes, information, and information technology assets. The role of the enterprise architect is to ensure that the business and IT are in alignment. The enterprise architect links the business mission, strategy, capabilities and processes of an organization to its IT strategy, documents this using multiple architectural models or views that show how the current and future needs of an organization will be met in an efficient, sustainable, agile, and adaptable manner, and fosters the changes needed to achieve.

Exceptional executive present is crucial to succeed in this role. You will facilitate complex discussions, influence peers and stakeholders, and serve as a thought leader to inspire change. As a key figure in evolving the Enterprise Architecture practice, you will uphold consistent quality across methodology and deliverables while addressing today's digital challenges with technical expertise, leadership, and strategic foresight.

Your responsibilities include guiding installations, testing, and service transitions while identifying and leveraging technological innovations. You will engage with businesses to drive the adoption of cutting-edge solutions and oversee incident, change, release, problem, performance, and availability management, ensuring operational excellence.

Costco's Enterprise Architecture team is seeking an AI Architect to advance our AI and machine learning (ML) practice and guide enterprise-wide transformation efforts. As a core member of the Enterprise Architecture team, this individual will:

Define future state AI/ML architecture and technology roadmap.

Link business strategies and processes to AI/ML technology strategies, ensuring AI initiatives support enterprise objectives and deliver measurable business value.

Establish and maintain models of AI-driven organizational value streams, goals, strategies, capabilities, processes, information, and IT assets. Ensure these models capture both traditional and AI/ML-specific business functions.

Define and enforce target state and reference architectures, principles, guardrails, and standards for AI/ML, ensuring alignment with industry best practices, ethical frameworks (e.g., responsible AI), and regulatory guidelines (GDPR, NIST AI RMF).

Develop and manage AI governance frameworks including model lifecycle management (MLOps), model monitoring, data governance, bias mitigation, explainability (XAI), and compliance.

Lead initiatives around AI governance, MLOps pipeline optimization (monitoring/drift detection), and continuous improvement of intelligent solutions.

Develop and promote reusable AI/ML architectural patterns (e.g., generative AI workflows, RAG architectures) that foster innovation while adhering to best practices.

Collaborate with stakeholders to operationalize AI use cases (e.g., demand forecasting, NLP for customer service), embedding AI into end-to-end business process models.

Lead reviews of AI-driven solution designs for scalability, interoperability, and compliance.

Investigate emerging technologies (generative AI, computer vision), assess enterprise impact through research/proof-of-concepts, and build business cases for adoption.

Define data requirements for AI (feature stores, pipelines), advise on data-sharing strategies to support ML models, and ensure data quality/security in AI contexts.

Evaluate public cloud services and hybrid architectures for cost-effective deployment of intelligent systems.

Mentor cross-functional teams on AI/ML adoption; bridge gaps between data scientists, engineers, and business units to foster a collaborative environment.

Required:

Core Enterprise Architecture

5+ years' architecture experience with business/capability modeling using EA frameworks (TOGAF/Zachman).

5+ years of demonstrated experience with analyzing and documenting business value streams, capabilities, processes, and data using model-based representations for the purpose of collecting, aggregating, or analyzing complex business information.

Proven ability to define future architecture/technology roadmap and align technology strategy with business goals.

Strong communication skills to translate technical concepts for executives and technical teams.

Demonstrates a strong understanding and passion for emerging technologies

Proven skills in leadership, relationship building, negotiation, collaboration, advocacy, governance, and consensus building.

Excellent verbal and written communication skills at all levels.

Team player with proven ability to work effectively within a large matrix organization.

Ability to make architecture changes in a dynamic agile environment.

Specialized AI/ML Experience

3+ years' experience leading or architecting production-grade AI/ML solutions, hands-on with frameworks such as TensorFlow/PyTorch etc.

Experience designing MLOps pipelines (MLflow/Kubeflow) and implementing model lifecycle management/governance.

Knowledge of responsible/ethical AI practices: bias detection/mitigation; explainability; regulatory compliance.

Proficiency in public cloud AI services: GCP Capgemini/Vertex AI; distributed data platforms (data lakes/feature stores).

Demonstrates a strong understanding of emerging AI and ML technologies to support the development of new solutions, such as, Agentic AI, GenAI, etc.

Leadership & Collaboration

Demonstrated skills in leadership, stakeholder engagement, consensus-building for strategic initiatives.

Team mentorship experience focused on upskilling in AI/ML domains.

Direct people management experience is a plus.

Recommended

Bachelor degree or equivalent experience in computer science, information systems or related fields. Advanced degree a plus.

10+ years of Technology and Retail / Supply Chain experience.

Experience working in ERP and Retail systems software (IBM i and/or SAP), including knowledge of Product Lifecycle.

Knowledge of software development lifecycle methodologies with experience in both Classic and Agile (scaled) methodologies.

Experience with distributed Enterprise/Solution Architecture.

TOGAF certification, Cloud, AI certification.

Working knowledge of DevOps, agile methodology, and continuous improvement.

Industry AI publications/voice in leading forums

Proficient in Google Workspace applications, including Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Gmail.

Required Documents

Cover Letter

Resume

California applicants, please review the Costco Applicant Privacy Notice.

Pay Range: Principal Architect - $160,000 - $250,000, Bonus and Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) eligible

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, health benefits - medical/dental/vision/hearing aid/pharmacy/behavioral health/employee assistance, health care reimbursement account, dependent care assistance plan, short-term disability and long-term disability insurance, AD&D insurance, life insurance, 401(k), stock purchase plan to eligible employees.

Costco is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Costco is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or any other legally protected status. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request to IT-Recruiting@costco.com

If hired, you will be required to provide proof of authorization to work in the United States. In some cases, applicants and employees for selected positions will not be sponsored for work authorization, including, but not limited to H1-B visas.