Director of AI
Senior Principal AI Architect
PepsiCo · Consumer Goods / Food & Beverage · 250,000+ employees · 📍 Plano, TX
PepsiCo needs a senior architect to own and build an enterprise-grade AI observability platform spanning LLMs, multi-agent systems, physical AI, and third-party agentic platforms — a foundational infrastructure role as the company scales its agentic AI ecosystem.
AI Maturity
advanced
Reports To
CTO
Why Role Exists
Expansion
Company Stage
public
Source
linkedin
Key Responsibilities
- Design and own enterprise observability architecture for AI agents, LLMs, multi-agent workflows, and physical AI systems including telemetry, tracing, and semantic signals
- Instrument OpenTelemetry (OTEL) across third-party agentic platforms (Salesforce AgentForce, ServiceNow, Microsoft Agent 365) and internal frameworks with protocol-level coverage (MCP, A2A, UCP, AP2)
- Build and operate unified telemetry pipelines (metrics, logs, distributed traces, Kafka event streaming) at enterprise scale
- Lead observability-driven red team exercises targeting agentic AI attack surfaces including adversarial prompt injection, model evasion, and multi-agent trust boundary failures
- Establish cost telemetry and FinOps observability for AI workloads across cloud environments (Azure, AWS, GCP)
- Deliver dashboards, SLO/SLA management, incident runbook automation, and RCA tooling to reduce MTTR across agentic services
- Own observability for agent fleets, physical AI systems, and self-evolving RL harnesses including reward shaping and policy evaluation signal capture
Requirements
- Deep expertise in OpenTelemetry (OTEL) and distributed tracing at enterprise scale
- Hands-on experience with LLM and agentic AI systems (RAG, multi-agent orchestration, planner/executor loops)
- Proficiency in real-time event streaming (Kafka) and telemetry pipeline engineering
- Experience with multi-cloud environments (Azure, AWS, GCP) and AI workload cost management
- Knowledge of AI safety, red teaming, and responsible AI principles in production contexts
Signals
- ⚠ No salary range posted — opaque compensation for a senior role
- ⚠ Extremely broad scope (LLMs + physical AI + RL + red teaming + FinOps) may indicate under-resourced or poorly scoped position
- ⚠ Job description appears truncated — Safety/Security section cut off mid-sentence
- ⚠ Onsite in Plano, TX may limit candidate pool for niche AI observability expertise
- ⚠ Repeat posting within days of previous identical posting (May 30, 2026) suggests difficulty filling the role
- ✓ Clear, specific technical mandate with well-articulated scope — not vague AI theater
- ✓ Dedicated AI Solutions & Platforms org signals organizational commitment
- ✓ Integration with multiple enterprise AI platforms (Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft) indicates real production scale
- ✓ Role spans safety, RAI, and governance — board/executive-level visibility likely
- ✓ Fortune 50 company with resources to fund significant AI infrastructure investment
Company History
This is at minimum the second posting for this identical role within a very short window (previous posting dated May 30, 2026 matches exactly) — suggesting the role has either been difficult to fill due to the niche intersection of enterprise observability + agentic AI expertise, or a previous candidate fell through late in the process.