Principal Architect - Source AI

Who You'll Work With

Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward.

In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we'll provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you'll receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.

When you join us, you will have:

• Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development. The real magic happens when you take the input from others to heart and embrace the fast-paced learning experience, owning your journey.
• A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions, all while upholding our unwavering commitment to ethics and integrity. We not only encourage diverse perspectives, but they are critical in driving us toward the best possible outcomes.
• Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients. Plus, you’ll have the opportunity to learn from exceptional colleagues with diverse backgrounds and experiences.
• World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary (based on your location, experience, and skills), we provide a comprehensive benefits package to enable holistic well-being for you and your family.
  
  

Your Impact

You will lead the engineering function for Source.AI, McKinsey's GenAI-powered, agentic category-management and sourcing platform.

You will set and drive the end-to-end technical vision across data engineering, data science, and full-stack software development, ensuring the platform is designed, built, and scaled to meet the needs of enterprise procurement clients globally.

You will own technical direction for a multi-surface product stack: AWS based, a NestJS and Next.js monorepo (Nx, pnpm), Python FastAPI microservices, per-client Snowflake data tenants, and an agentic AI layer spanning spend intelligence, market radar, category strategy, negotiation coaching, and tail-spend repricing. You will lead a team of data engineers, data scientists, and full-stack developers, partnering with product leadership and delivery leads to ship the roadmap while maintaining delivery SLAs on live client deployments.

You will architect and operationalize GenAI capabilities at production scale, including retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), NL2SQL, prompt engineering, vector search, and multi-agent orchestration, all routed through McKinsey's enterprise AI Gateway with Responsible-AI guardrails. You will establish engineering best practices, AI-assisted SDLC workflows, and observability standards so the team ships secure, reliable, and governable AI-driven features on a continuous cadence.

You will play a critical role in scaling Source.AI from a proven PoC portfolio to an enterprise-grade SaaS platform, driving transformative impact by enabling intelligent, scalable, and secure agent-based technologies that unlock measurable savings, productivity, and risk visibility for procurement teams worldwide.

Your Qualifications and Skills

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or a related field; Master's degree preferred
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering or platform architecture, including 3+ years in technical leadership or people management roles leading cross-functional engineering teams
• Proven track record building and scaling GenAI products in production, with ownership of architecture, delivery, post-launch iteration, reliability, and performance
• Experience leading teams across data engineering, data science, and full-stack development, with the ability to set technical direction, mentor senior ICs, and drive accountability across workstreams
• Strong expertise in GenAI systems, including LLMs, prompt engineering, tool calling, RAG pipelines, NL2SQL, vector databases, embeddings, and multi-agent orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, or Semantic Kernel
• Proficiency with AI-assisted software development methodologies and tools, including Cursor, Claude Code, and comparable agentic coding environments; comfortable driving an AI-native SDLC across teams
• Strong cloud engineering experience, preferably on AWS, with working knowledge of Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, distributed or event-driven systems, message queues, and real-time data flows
• Hands-on experience with Snowflake data modeling, multi-tenant data isolation, and ETL/ELT pipelines for enterprise-scale data onboarding
• Familiarity with modern full-stack development, including TypeScript/Node.js, NestJS, React/Next.js, Python/FastAPI, and monorepo tooling such as Nx and pnpm
• Knowledge of AI governance, security, compliance, and observability, including guardrails for safety and reliability, prompt tracing, cost tracking, and failure analysis
• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to align product leaders, partners, delivery teams, and cross-functional stakeholders around technical and business priorities

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