Lead Applied AI Software Engineer ( AI)

Lead Data Engineer

The Enterprise AI organization at Humana is a pioneering force, driving AI innovation across our Insurance and CenterWell business segments. By collaborating with world-leading experts, we are at the forefront of delivering cutting-edge AI technologies for improving care quality and experience of millions of consumers. Our goal is to create safe AI solutions that will revolutionize and improve healthcare experience and outcomes for our customers.

We are actively seeking top talent to join us in shaping the future of healthcare through AI excellence. Join our rapidly expanding team of dedicated product managers, data scientists, engineers, policy experts, and business leaders as we work together to build impactful and beneficial AI systems.

At Humana, applied artificial intelligence is central to driving intelligent automation that reduces administrative burden, enabling personalization that delivers tailored member experiences, and optimizing operational efficiency across the complex healthcare ecosystem. We are seeking an accomplished Lead Applied AI Engineer to architect and deliver advanced AI systems that seamlessly integrate Generative AI capabilities and intelligent agents into secure, scalable healthcare platforms that handle millions of member interactions while maintaining the highest standards of data privacy and system reliability.

This highly technical and influential role defines technical standards for AI deployment across the organization, ensures that AI systems are reliable through rigorous testing and monitoring, measurable through comprehensive metrics and evaluation frameworks, compliant with healthcare regulations and ethical guidelines, and strategically aligned with enterprise architecture and business strategy. The Lead Applied AI Engineer will operate at the critical intersection of AI innovation and responsible healthcare technology, balancing the rapid pace of AI advancement with the careful, deliberate approach required in healthcare environments.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect comprehensive end-to-end AI systems including sophisticated RAG pipelines with multi-stage retrieval and re-ranking, complex agent orchestration systems that coordinate multiple specialized agents, and multi-model integrations that leverage different AI models for their respective strengths, designing these systems with appropriate modularity, extensibility, and operational characteristics to support evolving business requirements.
• Define rigorous standards for prompt engineering including templates, versioning, and testing methodologies, establish comprehensive evaluation metrics that capture both technical performance and business value, and develop performance optimization strategies including model selection criteria, caching approaches, and resource utilization patterns that teams across the organization can adopt to accelerate AI delivery.
• Lead deployment of AI systems into production environments with strong observability including detailed logging and tracing, comprehensive reliability including graceful degradation and circuit breakers, thorough monitoring including real-time dashboards and automated alerting, and robust incident response procedures, ensuring AI services meet stringent service level objectives required for healthcare applications.
• Design scalable data ingestion architectures that can process diverse data sources including structured databases, unstructured documents, and real-time streams, implement efficient retrieval architectures using vector databases and hybrid search approaches, develop data preprocessing pipelines that clean and enrich data for AI consumption, and establish data quality monitoring to ensure AI systems operate on high-quality inputs.
• Drive quantitative evaluation and continuous improvement of AI systems through establishment of evaluation frameworks, implementation of A/B testing capabilities, analysis of user feedback and system telemetry, and systematic iteration on prompts, retrieval strategies, and model configurations to progressively improve system performance and user satisfaction over time.
• Collaborate strategically with platform teams to ensure infrastructure readiness for demanding AI workloads including GPU availability, appropriate networking configurations, and optimized data storage, define requirements for AI-specific platform capabilities such as model serving infrastructure and feature stores, and partner on integration of AI systems with enterprise services.
• Mentor engineers at various levels through technical guidance, code reviews, architecture discussions, and career development support, elevate AI engineering best practices across the organization through creation of documentation, delivery of training sessions, and establishment of communities of practice, and foster a culture of responsible AI development that prioritizes ethics, transparency, and user benefit.
• Ensure AI solutions rigorously meet healthcare compliance requirements through comprehensive documentation of system behavior and decision logic, implementation of ethical standards that prevent algorithmic bias and ensure fairness across different populations, and adherence to regulatory frameworks including HIPAA, FDA guidance for clinical decision support, and emerging AI-specific regulations.

Use your skills to make an impact

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering with a strong focus on applied AI/ML, building and operating distributed systems at scale, and developing full-stack architectures that combine backend services with modern web applications, demonstrated through leadership of significant projects that delivered measurable business impact through AI capabilities.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field, or equivalent practical experience demonstrated through significant technical leadership in AI projects, recognized contributions to the AI engineering community, or progressive career advancement into increasingly responsible AI technical leadership roles.
• Demonstrated deep expertise designing and deploying production-grade generative AI systems including sophisticated RAG architectures with multi-hop retrieval and reasoning, agent orchestration frameworks that coordinate multiple AI agents with tool use and memory, multi-model systems that combine different AI capabilities, and conversational AI systems that maintain context and handle complex dialogues.
• Proven ability to lead complex AI initiatives across multiple teams with different specializations, translating high-level business objectives into concrete AI system designs and technical roadmaps, coordinating implementation across frontend, backend, data, and infrastructure teams, and driving projects from conception through production deployment and ongoing optimization.
• Strong technical proficiency in Python including advanced language features and design patterns, extensive experience with modern web application frameworks (e.g., React, FastAPI) including best practices for scalability and maintainability, and deep knowledge of AI-specific technologies including vector databases, embedding models, LLM APIs, and orchestration frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience establishing organization-wide best practices for prompt engineering including systematic testing and version control, comprehensive evaluation frameworks that combine automated metrics with human assessment, model observability including tracking of costs and performance, and performance benchmarking methodologies that enable data-driven optimization decisions.
• Deep familiarity with responsible AI principles including fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics, understanding of governance considerations for AI systems including model risk management and validation requirements, and practical experience addressing deployment challenges in regulated environments including testing, documentation, change management, and ongoing monitoring requirements.

Preferred Qualifications

• Excellent leadership skills including ability to influence technical direction across organizational boundaries, proven mentoring and coaching abilities that develop engineering talent, and strong cross-functional collaboration skills enabling effective partnership with product management, data science, design, security, compliance, and business stakeholders.
• Experience in healthcare industries

This position follows a hybrid work style and must be performed at one of our designated IT hub locations: New York City; Louisville, KY; Tampa, FL; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA or Washington, D.C.

To ensure Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees' ability to work effectively, the self-provided internet service of Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees must meet the following criteria:

• At minimum, a download speed of 25 Mbps and an upload speed of 10 Mbps is required; wireless, wired cable or DSL connection is suggested.
• Satellite, cellular and microwave connection can be used only if approved by leadership.
• Employees who live and work from Home in the state of California, Illinois, Montana, or South Dakota will be provided a bi-weekly payment for their internet expense.
• Humana will provide Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees with telephone equipment appropriate to meet the business requirements for their position/job.
• Work from a dedicated space lacking ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI / HIPAA information.

Scheduled Weekly Hours 40

Pay Range $170,800 - $234,800 per year

This job is eligible for a bonus incentive plan. This incentive opportunity is based upon company and/or individual performance.

Referral Bonus Information This requisition is not eligible for a referral bonus.

About Humana: Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is a leading U.S. healthcare company. Through our Humana insurance services and our CenterWell healthcare services, we make it easier for the millions of people we serve to achieve their best health – delivering the care and service they need, when they need it. These efforts are leading to a better quality of life for people with Medicare and Medicaid, families, individuals, military service personnel, and communities at large. Learn more about what we offer at Humana.com and at CenterWell.com.

Equal Opportunity Employer It is the policy of Humana not to discriminate against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, marital status, genetic information, disability or protected veteran status. It is also the policy of Humana to take affirmative action, in compliance with Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act and VEVRAA, to employ and to advance in employment individuals with disability or protected veteran status, and to base all employment decisions only on valid job requirements. This policy shall apply to all employment actions, including but not limited to recruitment, hiring, upgrading, promotion