Job Description

Holland America Line has been exploring the world since 1873. Our ships offer innovative features and enriching experiences focused on destination exploration and personalized travel, inviting guests to savor the journey. 

We are looking for an AI Solution Architect. The AI Solution Architect provides enterprise-wide technical leadership for the design, governance, and evolution of AI and cloud-native systems across Holland America Line and Seabourn. This role defines the architectural standards, patterns, and platforms that enable agentic AI, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), multi-model orchestration, and real-time inference workloads on AWS. Operating as the principal technical authority, the architect guides solutions from early discovery and prototyping through production hardening, observability, and continuous optimization. The position is responsible for establishing reference architectures, cloud governance frameworks, and security controls that ensure AI systems integrate seamlessly with enterprise platforms—including identity services, APIs, data lakes, and event-driven systems—while meeting strict requirements for cost efficiency, latency, privacy, compliance, and auditability. The architect partners closely with engineering, product, data science, platform, and security teams to drive architectural decisions grounded in quantitative evidence such as evaluation metrics, load testing, cost modeling, and threat analysis. This role also leads the adoption of emerging AWS AI/ML services, oversees Well‑Architected Reviews for AI workloads, and designs zero‑trust security boundaries, encryption strategies, and data protection mechanisms aligned to SOC 2, GDPR, and corporate governance standards. The architect provides deep technical mentorship, unblocks complex engineering challenges, and accelerates delivery by developing reusable infrastructure modules, CI/CD patterns, and observability blueprints. As a principal-level leader, the AI Solution Architect influences long-term platform direction, vendor and technology selection, and enterprise-wide standards that shape the reliability, scalability, and financial sustainability of AI capabilities. The role requires strong executive communication, the ability to navigate ambiguity, and the judgment to balance model performance, infrastructure cost, security posture, and business risk across a multi-brand, global organization.

Here’s a summary of what Holland America Line is looking for.  Is this you? 

Responsibilities:

• Enterprise AI & Cloud Architecture Leadership: Serve as the principal technical authority for AI and cloud‑native architecture across Holland America Line and Seabourn. Own end‑to‑end architecture for agentic AI systems—from discovery and prototyping through production deployment, observability, and lifecycle optimization. Define and govern reusable reference architectures for autonomous agents, multi‑step tool/function calling, RAG pipelines, real‑time inference, and model evaluation frameworks. Establish cloud governance standards and lead AWS Well‑Architected Reviews across accounts, regions, and workloads. Drive architectural decisions using quantitative evidence such as evaluation metrics, load tests, cost modeling, and threat analysis.

• AI Platform Standards, Frameworks & Emerging Technology Integration: Define and enforce standards for model selection, benchmarking, prompt engineering, version control, and RAG indexing/retrieval patterns. Implement guardrails, content‑safety layers, and privacy‑preserving techniques including differential privacy, tokenization, and secure fine‑tuning pipelines. Evaluate and integrate emerging AWS AI/ML services (Bedrock, SageMaker, Titan, Trainium/Inferentia) into enterprise reference architectures. Maintain architectural decision records (ADRs) and ensure consistent adoption of platform-wide patterns and best practices. Influence build‑vs‑buy decisions, vendor selection, and long‑term platform direction.

• Security, Compliance & Risk Management: Partner with security, risk, and compliance teams to design zero‑trust IAM boundaries, secrets rotation, KMS encryption strategies, and VPC/network segmentation. Define data classification, retention, and DLP controls aligned with SOC 2, GDPR, and corporate governance frameworks. Lead threat modeling for AI‑specific attack vectors including prompt injection, data poisoning, and model exfiltration. Ensure audit‑grade logging, traceability, and monitoring for all AI workloads. Balance model accuracy, latency, cost, and security posture when making architectural tradeoffs.

• Performance Engineering, FinOps & Operational Excellence: Build and maintain enterprise cost models and FinOps dashboards for AI/ML workloads across AWS accounts. Define capacity planning, auto‑scaling policies, and latency/throughput SLOs for high‑volume inference systems. Implement optimization strategies such as inference caching, asynchronous orchestration, Spot/Graviton usage, model distillation, quantization, and intelligent model routing. Oversee production hardening, observability, incident response, and continuous optimization for AI services. Ensure reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency across multi‑brand, global AI platforms.

• Cross‑Functional Leadership, Mentorship & Delivery Enablement: Partner with product, engineering, data science, platform, and security leaders to define business‑aligned AI use cases and target‑state architectures. Lead technical discovery workshops, design sprints, and architecture reviews across multiple business units and regions. Mentor senior and mid‑level engineers, fostering architectural thinking and elevating technical decision‑making across teams. Unblock complex engineering challenges and conduct code/design reviews for high‑impact initiatives. Accelerate delivery by building reusable IaC modules (CDK/Terraform), CI/CD templates, observability blueprints, and self‑service developer platforms. Represent the organization in AWS partnership discussions and at industry events.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Scope: This role serves as the enterprise-wide technical authority for AI and cloud‑native architecture across Holland America Line and Seabourn, overseeing the full lifecycle of agentic AI systems on AWS. The position defines and governs reference architectures for autonomous agents, multi-step tool/function orchestration, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), real‑time inference pipelines, and model evaluation frameworks. It spans multiple business units, brands, and geographic regions, ensuring AI capabilities integrate seamlessly with identity systems, APIs, data lakes, event buses, and event-driven platforms. The architect is accountable for cloud governance standards, AWS Well‑Architected Reviews, and the adoption of emerging AWS AI/ML services such as Bedrock, SageMaker, Titan, and Trainium/Inferentia.

• Problem solving: The role operates in high ambiguity with incomplete information, requiring the ability to make consequential tradeoffs between model accuracy, inference latency, infrastructure cost, security posture, and business risk. The architect leads threat modeling for AI-specific attack vectors—including prompt injection, data poisoning, and model exfiltration—and designs zero-trust IAM boundaries, encryption strategies, secrets rotation, and network segmentation to mitigate risk. Complex technical challenges are resolved through deep technical credibility, quantitative analysis, and rigorous evaluation frameworks rather than intuition. The architect unblocks delivery teams, conducts code and design reviews, and ensures that AI workloads are hardened, observable, and resilient in production environments.

• Impact: Architectural decisions made in this role directly affect production reliability, system scalability, speed-to-market for AI products, enterprise security posture, regulatory compliance, and multi-million‑dollar AWS operating costs. The architect ensures AI systems meet stringent requirements for latency, cost efficiency, privacy, auditability, and compliance with SOC 2, GDPR, and corporate governance frameworks. By developing reusable IaC modules, CI/CD templates, observability blueprints, and self-service developer platforms, the role accelerates delivery velocity across teams. The architect also builds enterprise FinOps models, defines performance SLOs, and implements optimization strategies—such as inference caching, asynchronous orchestration, Spot/Graviton compute, model distillation, and quantization—to ensure sustainable, cost-effective AI operations.

• Leadership: The role provides principal-level technical leadership, setting the long-term architectural direction for the enterprise AI platform and influencing build‑vs‑buy decisions, vendor selection, and platform strategy. It requires deep collaboration with engineering, product, data science, platform, and security leaders to define business-aligned AI use cases and target-state architectures. As a hands-on leader, the architect prototypes rapidly, mentors senior engineers and architects, guides teams through design sprints and architecture reviews, and represents the organization in AWS partnership discussions and industry events. The position also establishes enterprise standards for model selection, benchmarking, prompt engineering, RAG patterns, privacy-preserving techniques, and architectural decision records.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Cloud Computing, or a related technical field; Master's degree preferred.

• 10+ years in software engineering, cloud architecture, or solution architecture with hands-on production system delivery.

• 5+ years designing and operating workloads on AWS (advanced networking, IAM, security, reliability, performance, CI/CD, multi-account governance).

• 3+ years hands-on experience delivering GenAI/LLM applications to production (autonomous agents, RAG systems, fine-tuned models, evaluation pipelines).

• AWS Solutions Architect Professional certification required; AWS Machine Learning Specialty or AWS Security Specialty strongly preferred.

• Demonstrated ability to lead architecture decisions at the enterprise level and communicate complex technical strategies to C-suite stakeholders.

• Experience with infrastructure as code (CDK or Terraform) and modern CI/CD pipelines in regulated environments.

• Designed, shipped, and operated at least two production-grade LLM/agent systems with defined SLOs, evaluation frameworks, and continuous improvement cycles.

• Architected enterprise-scale AWS environments (multi-account, multi-region) with landing zones, guardrails, and cost governance.

• Integrated AI services with enterprise identity providers (Okta, Azure AD), API gateways, event-driven architectures, and data lake/lakehouse platforms.

• Built and enforced security controls for sensitive data (PII/PHI) including encryption, tokenization, DLP, and audit-grade logging/traceability.

• Led cloud cost optimization initiatives resulting in measurable savings on AI/ML infrastructure spend.

• Operated AI systems post-launch with production observability (monitoring, alerting, incident response, post-mortems, SLO tracking).

• Mentored or technically led teams of 5+ engineers through complex architecture and delivery cycles.

Travel: Less than 25% with shipboard travel likely

Work Conditions: Work primarily in a climate-controlled environment with minimal safety/health hazard potential.

Physical Demands: Must be able to remain in a stationary position at a desk and/or computer for extended periods of time.

This position is classified as “in-office.”  As an in-office role, it requires employees to work from a designated Carnival office in South Florida Monday through Thursday each week. 

What You Can Expect

• Cruise and Travel Privileges for You and Your Family 
• Health Benefits 
• 401(k)  
• Employee Stock Purchase Plan  
• Training & Professional Development 
• Tuition & Professional Certification Reimbursement 
• Base Salary Range: $124,600 to $168,200 The range is applicable for the labor market where the role is intended to be hired. Final base salary is directly related to each candidate’s qualifications and experience uniquely. 

Our Culture…Stronger Together

Our highest responsibility and top priority is compliance, environmental protection and the health, safety and well-being of our guests, the people in the communities we touch and serve, and our shipboard and shoreside employees.  Please visit our site to learn more about our Culture Essentials, Corporate Vision Statement and our Core Values at:https://www.hollandamerica.com/en_US/our-company/mission-values.html

Holland America is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations and ordinances. 

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

Holland America will provide reasonable accommodations with the application process, upon your request, as required to comply with applicable laws.  If you have a disability and require assistance in this application process, please contact recruiting@hollandamericagroup.com

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