AI Architect (Contractor)

Department: DS Operations

Location: St. Louis, MO

Compensation: $90 – $95 per hour

Employment Type: Contract

Who We Are
Welcome to TELUS Digital — where innovation drives impact at a global scale. As an award-winning digital product consultancy and the digital division of TELUS, one of Canada’s largest telecommunications providers, we design and deliver transformative customer experiences through cutting-edge technology, agile thinking, and a people-first culture.
With a global team across North America, South America, Central America, Europe, Africa, and APAC, we offer end-to-end expertise across various service offerings: Web, Mobile & Digital Marketing | Enterprise AI | Customer Care AI & Technology | Enterprise Technology Modernization
From mobile apps and websites to voice UI, chatbots, AI, customer service, and in-store solutions, TELUS Digital enables seamless, trusted, and digitally powered experiences that meet customers wherever they are — all backed by the secure infrastructure and scale of our multi-billion-dollar parent company.

About the Role

We are establishing how AI is used in software development across our engineering organization. This person defines the standards, guardrails, and working practices that let our development teams build with AI agents safely, consistently, and at speed.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will spend part of your time with business and engineering leaders shaping standards, and part of it in the codebase with delivery teams making those standards real. It is not a purely advisory or architecture- review position.

You don't need to have owned this at organizational scale before. You do need to have worked this way yourself and understand the concepts well enough to build on them.

What You'll Do

• Define and roll out our organization-wide approach to spec-driven development — how teams write specifications, plans, and tasks that AI agents can reliably execute.

• Introduce and operationalize an AI-driven development lifecycle (AI-DLC): how AI fits into requirements, design, build, review, testing, and operations.

• Build the guardrails that keep AI-generated work safe and consistent — steering documents, constitutions, agent rules, review gates, and quality checks — and tailor them per team rather than issuing one generic policy.

• Evaluate, select, and roll out tooling (e.g. Kiro, GitHub Spec Kit, agentic coding assistants) and own the standards around them.

• Work directly with development teams: pair with them, write code, unblock them, and prove the standards work in real delivery before scaling them out.

• Partner with business stakeholders to translate their requirements into specifications that both humans and AI agents can work from.

• Measure adoption and impact, and iterate on the standards as tooling changes.

What You'll Need

Core (must have)

• Hands-on experience working with spec-driven development, and practical familiarity with industry-standard tooling in this space — Kiro, GitHub Spec Kit, or equivalents.

• Direct experience with steering documents, constitutions, and agent guardrails — whether you authored them or worked within them, you understand what belongs in them and why.

• Solid working experience with agentic AI — building, integrating, or operating AI agents, not just using AI chat tools.

• Broad understanding of current AI technologies and how they apply to software delivery.

• Enough technical leadership to carry a room of stakeholders and a pull request with equal credibility.

Also required (secondary to the above)

• Strong Java and Spring background.

• Experience designing and building microservices in production.

Nice to have

• Experience defining or rolling out AI development standards across multiple teams or an entire engineering organization.

• Experience driving adoption of a new way of working against initial team resistance.