Principal Architect | Agentic AI

About NIQ: NIQ is a leading global consumer intelligence company, helping clients understand what is happening, why it is happening, and what they should do next. Our data, technology, AI, and analytics capabilities power decision-making for some of the world’s most important consumer, retail, and technology businesses. AI is central to NIQ’s next stage of growth. We are building trusted, scalable, and high-impact AI capabilities that transform how insights are created, delivered, and adopted across the business. This role will help shape the platforms, operating model, and leadership system needed to make that ambition real. Our NielsenIQ Technology teams are building and evolving Connect, a unified, global, open data ecosystem powered by cloud and on-premises technologies. Clients around the world rely on NielsenIQ data and insights to innovate and grow. As a Principal Architect within the Enterprise Architecture team, you will define architecture for key components and capabilities across NIQ platforms, ensuring alignment with business strategy, product objectives, technology standards, and the long-term platform vision. You will partner with architecture peers, Product and Operations leaders, engineering leaders, and development teams to take solutions from initial requirements through design, delivery, and production operation. A key focus of this role is shaping the responsible adoption of Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, and agentic AI across the enterprise. The successful candidate will combine broad enterprise architecture experience with practical knowledge of AI-enabled systems and will grow into an end-to-end platform architect as their knowledge of NIQ's platforms expands. Responsibilities • Lead the development of architecture designs for key products and capabilities across NIQ platforms, working closely with product stakeholders, engineering teams, and other architects. • Define high-level solution approaches and blueprints that guide component-level design while maintaining an end-to-end view of platform integration, future products, and the technology roadmap. • Create, maintain, and promote reference architectures, architecture principles, standards, patterns, and decision records for key areas of the platform. • Shape enterprise architecture for AI, Generative AI, and agentic AI solutions, including model integration, retrieval-augmented generation, orchestration, tool and API use, memory, workflow automation, and human-in-the-loop controls. • Define reusable patterns for secure and scalable AI agents, including identity and access control, data grounding, context management, guardrails, evaluation, observability, auditability, failure handling, and cost management. • Partner with security, privacy, legal, data governance, and Responsible AI stakeholders to ensure AI solutions meet enterprise requirements for confidentiality, intellectual property, regulatory compliance, transparency, and risk management. • Assess emerging technologies and viable alternatives for front-end applications, platform services, data pipelines, databases, AI platforms, foundation models, vector stores, and agentic frameworks, including build-versus-buy recommendations. • Establish model and solution evaluation criteria covering quality, accuracy, groundedness, safety, latency, scalability, resilience, and total cost of ownership. • Identify future-state solutions and drive innovation through proofs of concept, technology migrations, controlled pilots, and productionization. • Provide architecture leadership, coaching, and design governance, promoting pragmatic, high-quality solutions and consistent engineering practices across teams. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience. 8+ years of experience in application development, solution design, or software architecture, supported by a strong engineering background and experience with enterprise-scale platforms. Demonstrated experience designing and delivering scalable, secure, highly available, and observable distributed systems in production. Strong knowledge of enterprise data architecture, data modelling, and high-volume processing across relational and non-relational data stores; experience with multi-terabyte databases is strongly preferred. Experience with Azure AI services, Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, or comparable enterprise AI platforms. Familiarity with agentic AI frameworks and interoperability standards, such as semantic orchestration frameworks, multi-agent frameworks, and the Model Context Protocol. Experience defining Responsible AI governance, AI risk controls, threat modelling, red-teaming, or security patterns for AI-enabled applications. Strong knowledge of data structures, algorithms, and design for performance, scalability, availability, resilience, privacy, and security. Good knowledge of cloud architecture, preferably Microsoft Azure, including identity, networking, security, data, integration, monitoring, and platform services. Practical experience architecting or delivering AI or Generative AI solutions in production, with an understanding of large language models, embeddings, vector search, retrieval-augmented generation, prompt and context engineering, and model evaluation. Understanding of agentic AI architecture patterns, including agent orchestration, planning and reasoning workflows, tool calling, state and memory management, multi-agent coordination, human oversight, and safe execution boundaries. Ability to communicate complex architecture decisions clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders and to influence outcomes across organizational boundaries. Our Benefits Flexible working environment Volunteer time off LinkedIn Learning Employee-Assistance-Program (EAP) NIQ may utilize artificial intelligence (AI) tools at various stages of the recruitment process, including résumé screening, candidate assessments, interview scheduling, job matching, communication support, and certain administrative tasks that help streamline workflows. These tools are intended to improve efficiency and support fair and consistent evaluation based on job-related criteria. All use of AI is governed by NIQ’s principles of fairness, transparency, human oversight, and inclusion. Final hiring decisions are made exclusively by humans. NIQ regularly reviews its AI tools to help mitigate bias and ensure compliance with applicable laws and regulations. If you have questions, require accommodations, or wish to request human review were permitted by law, please contact your local HR representative. For more information, please visit NIQ’s AI Safety Policies and Guiding Principles: https://nielseniq.com/global/en/info/niqs-ai-safety-policies/ About NIQ NIQ is the world’s leading consumer intelligence company, delivering the most complete understanding of consumer buying behavior and revealing new pathways to growth. In 2023, NIQ combined with GfK, bringing together the two industry leaders with unparalleled global reach. With a holistic retail read and the most comprehensive consumer insights—delivered with advanced analytics through state-of-the-art platforms—NIQ delivers the Full View™. NIQ is an Advent International portfolio company with operations in 100+ markets, covering more than 90% of the world’s population. For more information, visit NIQ.com Want to keep up with our latest updates? Follow us on: LinkedIn | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook Our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion At NIQ, we are steadfast in our commitment to fostering an inclusive workplace that mirrors the rich diversity of the communities and markets we serve. We believe that embracing a wide range of perspectives drives innovation and excellence. All employment decisions at NIQ are made without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws. We invite individuals who share our dedication to inclusivity and equity to join us in making a meaningful impact. To learn more about our ongoing efforts in diversity and inclusion, please visit the https://nielseniq.com/global/en/news-center/diversity-inclusion