Enterprise AI Architect, Tekion
$178.9-238.6k
Cloud-native platform for the automotive retail industry
Be an early applicant
Cloud-native platform for the automotive retail industry
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$178.9-238.6k
1001+ employees
Company mission
To build the world's best business applications in the cloud.
Role
Who you are
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, data science or a related field
- 10–15+ years of experience in data architecture or enterprise architecture roles, with at least 5 years designing enterprise data models and leading data initiatives for AI
- Proven track record designing and implementing IT/data strategies and roadmaps for complex, multi‑million‑dollar initiatives
- Deep knowledge of relational and NoSQL database technologies and cloud data platforms
- Experience fine tuning or training large language models (private, open source, or API-based.) along with establishing best practices for RAG, fine-tuning, orchestration, and monitoring
- Ability to build and manage data pipelines for LLM training and fine tuning
- Skilled in evaluating and optimizing model performance and quality
- Familiarity with techniques such as transfer learning, reinforcement learning from human feedback and prompt engineering optimization
- Expertise in machine learning and deep learning frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikitlearn)
- Familiarity with MLOps practices and continuous integration continuous deployment pipelines
- Experience implementing data security and privacy controls and ensuring regulatory compliance
- Ability to communicate complex data concepts to technical and non‑technical stakeholders and influence senior leaders
- Demonstrated ability to build relationships and work across teams, including engineering, operations, product and business units
- Experience leading and mentoring data & AI teams, managing project timelines and balancing competing priorities
- Strong strategic thinking and problem‑solving skills; ability to translate business strategy into data architecture
What the job involves
- Enterprise Data Architect designs and leads the implementation of AI driven solutions across the Enterprise
- Working with executives and IT leaders, they design AI ready architectures and standards that integrate data across SaaS platforms, data lakes and analytics environments, enabling machine learning and generative AI solutions
- They govern data quality, accessibility and movement while curating structured and unstructured data to fuel ML, generative AI and computer vision models, ensuring that data and AI initiatives align tightly with business priorities
- Architect AI‑ready data environments – Design data ecosystems that support advanced analytics, machine learning and AI‑driven insights, ensuring both structured and unstructured data are accessible, reliable and actionable
- This includes integrating documents, logs and other unstructured sources into unified analytics ecosystems
- Enable AI/ML pipelines and model operations – Collaborate with data scientists and ML engineers to design feature‑engineering pipelines, model training data sets and MLOps workflows that are confirmed per security policies & standards
- Support real‑time data ingestion pipelines and transition ELT workflows to agile, CI/CD‑based ELT pipelines that power AI applications
- Implement AI governance and compliance – Establish data governance practices specifically for AI, including metadata tagging for training data, model lineage, bias detection and privacy controls
- Ensure AI data pipelines comply with ethical and regulatory requirements such as GDPR/CCPA, and align with enterprise governance frameworks
- Support AI classification and agent orchestration – Design architectures that support data classification for AI models and orchestrate data flows for multi‑agent systems, ensuring that data states and knowledge are properly managed
- Evaluate emerging AI technologies – Continually assess new AI/ML and generative‑AI technologies, tools and platforms
- Recommend solutions that improve data quality, analytics performance and automation, and lead proof‑of‑concept initiatives to demonstrate their value
- Align AI initiatives with business priorities – Ensure that AI and machine learning projects are tied to clear business objectives and deliver measurable value
- Collaborate with executive leadership to prioritize AI investments and define the Enterprise AI strategy
- Hands on experience with AI agents and generative AI – Demonstrate familiarity with building and integrating AI agents (e.g. , conversational bots, autonomous decision making agents) and generativeAI models
- Evaluate generativeAI frameworks, design governance around prompt engineering and model outputs, and guide teams on how to safely incorporate these technologies into Enterprise home-grown products, and workflows
- LargeLanguage Model (LLM) training – Hands on experience fine tuning or training LLMs (e.g. , GPT, BERT, Llama) using custom or domain specific data sets
Our take
Car dealerships suffer from an inefficiency problem. The paperwork and administration required to complete a sale requires dealers to manage a disjointed set of various software applications. Tekion is offering an enticing remedy - a cloud-based automative retail system that integrates the various software applications in a single infrastructure.
Competition has been strong, with rivals CDK Global and Reynolds & Reynolds offering a competitive raft of features, and benefitting from strong prior relationships with dealerships.
Tekion, however, has nevertheless secured customers for the software in 28 states - likely in part due to the efficiency of partnering with a single growing service as opposed to a disparate spread. The company is sparking interest from the right places too, with partners including GMC, Chrysler, and Chevrolet.
If the founders can leverage their experience at Tesla in improving efficiency, the system could prove a highly competitive newcomer with real potential for global spread. A reduction in processing time and paperwork is a hard proposition for dealerships to refuse.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
25% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Jul 2024
$200m
GROWTH EQUITY VC
Oct 2021
$250m
SERIES D
Total funding: $635.1m
Company benefits
- Competitive compensation and generous stock options
- 100% employer-paid top-of-the-line medical, dental and vision coverage
- Great benefits including unlimited PTO, parental leave and free snacks and beverages
- The opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds from the Silicon Valley’s most dominant and successful companies
- Be part of an early stage, hyper-growth startup with the opportunity to grow and prosper
- Work on the latest and coolest technologies – everything is home-grown and built ground-up
- Dynamic work environment with a strong sense of community and collaboration
- Open and transparent culture that encourages innovation, rewards performance and discourages hierarchy
- Exciting opportunities for career growth and development
Company HQ
Pleasanton, CA
Leadership
Jay Vijayan
(CEO)They started their career at Oracle, where they spent over 7 years in Management before spending 4 at VMware. They then worked at Tesla for 4 years, leaving their position as CIO to found Tekion in February 2016.
Guru Sankararaman
(COO)After working as a Chief Architect at Cisco, they joined Tesla for 4 years. Initially they served as Director of Information Technology and then later became VP of Information Technology. Left this role to co-found Tekion in 2016.
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