Principal Architect - Autonomous Agent Safety & Control Systems

When you join Verizon

You want more out of a career. A place to share your ideas freely — even if they’re daring or different. Where the true you can learn, grow, and thrive. At Verizon, we power and empower how people live, work and play by connecting them to what brings them joy. We do what we love — driving innovation, creativity, and impact in the world. Our V Team is a community of people who anticipate, lead, and believe that listening is where learning begins. In crisis and in celebration, we come together — lifting our communities and building trust in how we show up, everywhere & always. Want in? Join the #VTeamLife.

Why Build AI at Verizon?

Most AI engineers are stuck building isolated chatbots, tweaking prompts, or fine-tuning APIs in low-stakes sandboxes with human babysitters in every loop. At Verizon, we're architecting the agentic nervous system powering hundreds of mission-critical internal applications, voice systems, and automated workflows executing millions of real decisions every day.

The real engineering thrill here isn't just giving agents autonomy—it's solving the hardest systems challenge in modern software: building the deterministic guardrails, zero-trust firewalls, and sub-second circuit breakers that instantly intercept rogue behaviors, eliminate hallucinations, and trigger automated intervention when humans aren't in the loop to watch. If you want to move past toy AI and engineer production-grade safety, resilience, and multi-agent frameworks at genuine Fortune 20 scale, this is where you build it.

You'll combine your advanced AI engineering skills with responsible AI, integrity, and legal (RIL) to unleash the power and promise of enterprise AI through the use of autonomous agents. With tens of millions of connected devices, petabytes of streaming network telemetry, and strategic partnerships like Google Cloud’s Agentic Data Cloud and Gemini Enterprise, Nvidia for edge AI and GPU infrastructure, AWS, and as the only telecom company to participate in Anthropic's Glasswing project, you won't just run experiments in a sandbox— you'll be at the center of every AI project Verizon is building.

What you’ll be doing...

The Enterprise AI Control Plane team is adding a hands-on architectural engineer to build the complex system connecting Verizon’s AI developer platforms (AWS Bedrock, Atlas AI) with our governance hubs (Engram, Agent Registry). This role provides a dedicated builder who architects robust APIs, automated CI/CD guardrails, and real-time observability telemetry to ensure autonomous agents run safely at enterprise scale.

In this role you will...

• Architect and code automated CI/CD governance pipelines that inject Security and RIL (Responsible AI, Integrity, Legal) guardrails directly into the deployment lifecycle.
• Implement advanced agent simulation and continuous real-time observability telemetry for production LLMs.
• Interact daily with AI Platform Engineers, DevOps/DataOps teams, Data Scientists, and AI product developers across various Business Units to integrate their models into the governance framework
• Architect Identity & Access Management (IAM) and routing logic within the Agent Gateway to ensure autonomous workflows operate with secure access boundaries.
• Build robust API integrations connecting developer platforms (Vegas, Atlas AI) seamlessly with Verizon governance hubs (Engram, Agent Registry).

What we’re looking for...

You've moved beyond standard RAG prototypes and API wrappers to solve the hard, unglamorous systems challenges of autonomous enterprise AI. You should be equally comfortable designing multi-agent execution frameworks and building the deterministic safety layers, zero-trust controls, and sub-second circuit breakers that prevent autonomous systems from going rogue in production.

You will need to have...

• Bachelor’s degree or four or more years of work experience.
• Six or more years of relevant experience required, demonstrated through one or a combination of work and/or military experience, or specialized training.
• Four or more years of experience as an AI Engineer and Architect designing and deploying scalable, multi-agent frameworks leveraging emerging interaction standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent (A2A communications
• Experience in LLM operationalization, orchestration frameworks, model evaluation frameworks, agentic workflows, and automated safety testing.
• Experience in cloud architecture (AWS Bedrock)
• Experience with AI Security, Zero Trust, and Model Governance
• Experience defending agentic ecosystems against prompt injection, data exfiltration, tool abuse, hallucinations, and guarantees factual accuracy
• Experienceshippingsoftware into high-traffic, regulated, or enterprise production environments where downtime, inaccurate data, or out-of-bounds agent actions carry severe real-world consequences.

Even better if you also have one or more of the following...

• Masters or PhD in Computer Science, AI/ML, or related field.
• Six or more years of platform engineering, as well as applied ML engineering, or AI science
• Advanced skills in programming in Python, Kubernetes
• Advanced knowledge of CI/CD deployment tools
• Knowledge of automated safety testing and Agentic Identity & Access Management
• Experience building real-time telemetry, trace-level monitoring (OpenTelemetry, Langfuse, Arize), and automated fail-safes. When an agent experiences semantic drift, enters a recursive tool-calling loop, or attempts an unauthorized action without human oversight, your systems isolate the process and revert state in milliseconds.

If Verizon and this role sound like a fit for you, we encourage you to apply even if you don’t meet every “even better” qualification listed above.

Where you’ll be working

In this hybrid role, you'll have a defined work location that includes working from home and a minimum of three days per week in the office, which will be set by your manager. Employees are responsible for maintaining compliance with hybrid work policies.

Scheduled Weekly Hours

40

Equal Employment Opportunity

Verizon is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to veteran status, disability or other legally protected characteristics.

Benefits and Compensation

Our benefits are designed to help you move forward in your career, and in areas of your life outside of Verizon. From health and wellness benefit options including: medical, dental, vision, short and long term disability, basic life insurance, supplemental life insurance, AD&D insurance, identity theft protection, pet insurance and group home & auto insurance. We also offer a matched 401(k) savings plan, up to 8 company paid holidays per year and up to 6 personal days per year, paid parental leave, adoption assistance and tuition assistance, plus other incentives, we’ve got you covered with our award-winning total rewards package. Depending on the role, employees have the opportunity to receive compensation in the form of premium pay such as overtime, shift differential, holiday pay, allowances, etc. Newly hired employees receive up to 15 days of vacation per year, which grows with additional service. For part-timers, your coverage will vary as you may be eligible for some of these benefits depending on your individual circumstances.

The salary will vary depending on your location and confirmed job-related skills and experience. This is an incentive based position with the potential to earn more. For part-time roles, your compensation will be adjusted to reflect your hours.The annual salary range for the location(s) listed on this job requisition based on a full-time schedule is: $120,500.00 - $231,000.00.The annual salary range for the Illinois location(s) listed on this job requisition based on a full-time schedule is: $132,500.00 - $231,000.00.Verizon will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.