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 the most powerful tools in the world to give people greater voice, while bringing people across the political spectrum together to identify shared solutions.

Our core petitions platform, used by more than 100 million people annually, is growing rapidly - and we are rebuilding it from the ground-up using new tools to turn anyone into a powerful civic leader on the issues they care about. Soon we will launch a new platform to identify the >80% of issues that most people agree on, locally and nationally, and to mobilize hundreds of millions of people to advocate for those common-ground solutions.

To realize this vision, we’re expanding the most talented team in the world at the intersection of technology and social impact - all focused every day on building healthier democracies globally.

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 corgi 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.