AI Architect

Change.org is searching for an AI Architect. You will report to our CTO. As a key member of our Engineering team, you’ll lead through technical authority, hands-on work, and influence — not through a reporting line. You’ll operate as the org-wide technical owner for AI adoption, working across every engineering team.

Change.org is the world’s largest platform for democracy.

At a time when dissatisfaction with democracy globally is at an all-time high, we’re investing heavily in using AI to build an operating system for modern democracy. This includes our platform for giving people greater voice, a personalized voter guide for elections, and a new product which aims to bring people across the political spectrum together to identify shared solutions.

To realize this vision, we're building a team at the intersection of technology and civic engagement — bringing together top talent focused on giving citizens a direct voice, strengthening accountability, and building stronger, more resilient democracies.

Key Outcomes:

• Technical direction for AI adoption. Define and evolve the standards, architecture patterns, and tooling choices that govern how engineers use AI across the codebase — including where to invest in codebase readiness (instrumentation, specification, evaluation) versus targeted rewrites.
• The AI-Native Transformation roadmap. Own execution of the multi-milestone plan (readiness → validated → governed) applied to primary and secondary repos, in partnership with squad leads — without being their manager.
• Platform and tooling capability. Decide what AI tooling, agent infrastructure, and evaluation pipelines the org needs, and build or oversee the build of the ones that don't exist yet.
• Guardrails for safe adoption. Set the policy and technical controls for where human-in-the-loop review is required versus where autonomous agent action (PR review, deployment) is safe — resolving the tension between adoption speed and security/quality risk.
• Standards authorship and enforcement. Write the guidance engineers actually use — AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md conventions, review norms for AI-generated code, eval standards — and make sure it's adopted, not just published.

The most important core competencies for the role are:

• AI/LLM systems fluency. Deep, current hands-on experience building with LLMs and agentic systems — not just using AI coding assistants, but understanding how to architect around them.
• Software architecture at scale. Track record designing and evolving systems in large, mature codebases (multi-million line, many-service environments).
• Hands-on engineering credibility. Enough recent, real shipping experience that senior engineers treat this person as a peer, not a strategist parachuting in.
• Standards authorship. Experience writing technical standards or guidance that other engineers actually adopted — with evidence, not just documents that sat unread.
• Security and risk judgment. Comfortable making the call on where autonomous AI action is safe and where it isn't, and defending that call under pressure.
• Change management without authority. Has driven org-wide technical change as an IC, influencing teams they don't manage.
• Communication and translation. Can move fluidly between deep technical detail and an executive-level narrative.

Nice to Have

• Experience leading an AI or developer-productivity transformation at a similar-scale engineering org.
• Experience building or operating evaluation pipelines for AI systems.

Target experience:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with several at staff/principal level or above.
• Ownership of a large, mature codebase's evolution - Architected or evolved a dominant monolith or multi-service system at scale.
• High adoption of Standards - Authored technical conventions, review norms, or architectural guardrails that other engineering teams actually adopted — with evidence of adoption..

Interested? Great! Here's what you should know:

This is a full time role and while we strongly prefer folks living in the United States, we are open to folks in Canada or Mexico.

Our compensation philosophy is based on pay equity. All of our salaries are determined before we launch a role – they are based on a predetermined salary scale, the level on that scale and the cost of labor for that location. In the United States, the annual salary of an AI Architect is $330,000 in San Francisco and New York City, $313,500 in Austin, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, Chicago and DC, and $280,500 for all other cities.

In Canada, the salary is CAD$ 287,000 in Victoria and Calgary, CAD$ 310,000 in Vancouver and Toronto and CAD$ 283,000 in all other cities in Canada.

In Mexico, the salary is MX$ 2,415,000.

Benefits and perks also vary based on location.

Our evaluation process is as follows:

• Interview with Recruiter - 45 minutes
• Interview with hiring manager - 45 minutes
• Timed Assessment - 2 hours
• Team interviews - 3 hours
• Executive Interview - 30 minutes

We recognize that people assess their qualifications differently, and you may not meet every requirement listed. If you believe you could be successful in this role, we encourage you to apply.

Change.org is an open platform designed to serve people across the full range of viewpoints. We expect all candidates to have thought about whether it’s a fit for you to work at a genuinely open platform like this, in which you will regularly be exposed to opinions and campaigns which are in sharp contrast to your own values and/or beliefs.

We are an equal opportunity employer and consider all qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity [or expression], national origin, protected veteran status, disability, age, or any other status protected by law.

We're committed to protecting your data. To learn more, please review our Change.org Job Applicant Privacy Policy.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout our recruitment process. If you need assistance or an accommodation, please let your recruiter know.

Change.org voluntarily collects limited demographic information for government reporting and to support our diversity and inclusion efforts. Providing this information is entirely optional and anonymous, and is not used in hiring decisions.

The categories in this survey are standardized and may not reflect how everyone describes themselves.

Change.org participates in E-verify - click here to learn more.

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Professional-level English proficiency is required for all roles. While we are a global company, we ask that all resumes and application responses be submitted in English.