AI Engineering Leader

Vertafore; Colorado; On-site; USD 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Vertafore is seeking an AI Engineering Leader to own a core AI product domain and lead a 4-8 person engineering team. This role blends hands-on coding with strategic architecture and cross-functional collaboration to deliver reliable AI features at scale.

You will drive end-to-end delivery, establish rigorous engineering standards, and collaborate with product managers to translate customer problems into a practical AI roadmap.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in machine learning, AI engineering, or data science.
• 1-3+ years of direct people management or tech lead experience.
• Hands-on production experience with LLM-powered apps, agentic workflows, or document extraction pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Lead a high-performing AI engineering team of 4-8 engineers; conduct 1:1s and set technical direction.
• Own end-to-end delivery of AI features from design to deployment and post-production observability.
• Stay hands-on with design reviews, code and architecture decisions, and enable the team to move experiments to production.

Skills

Machine learning

People management

Hands-on AI

Python

Cloud deployment

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering/Math

Tools

LangChain/LangGraph

Vector databases

Prompt engineering

Model evaluation tooling

AWS

Job description

$200,000 - $300,000 Total Compensation

The insurance industry runs on Vertafore. We equip agencies, MGAs, and carriers with the core digital systems, specialized AI, and data-driven foundation to eliminate distribution drag across the insurance lifecycle, spanning sales, servicing, and back‑office operations.

Underpinned by unmatched speed and performance power, we are the trusted backbone that’s taking the insurance industry from friction to flow with Distribution Velocity - speed, performance, and trust - to drive growth at scale.

With over 95% of the top agencies and insurers and 50% of industry compliance transactions running through Vertafore, we lead at the intersection of innovation and trust, giving insurance professionals the confidence to transform and win in the AI era.

Our reach is global, with headquarters in Denver, Colorado, and offices across the U.S., Canada, and India.

About The Role

Vertafore's AI organization is moving fast — from agentic workflows to intelligent document processing and predictive analytics. These systems are in production, serving thousands of agencies and carriers across North America, and the bar for reliability, scalability, and craft is high.

We’re looking for an AI Engineering Leader who leads from the front. You'll own delivery for one of our core AI product domains, managing a small team of engineers while staying close enough to the work that you're the person your team turns to when the architecture gets hard. You’ll be a hands on leader with expertise in designing, evaluating, and shipping AI based features.

This is not a role for someone who has stepped fully away from the code. You are an active participant in the team, reviewing PR’s, making technical decisions, and writing code. Your value multiplier is the team you build and enable, but your credibility comes from the depth you bring.

What You’ll Do

Lead a High‑Performing AI Engineering Team

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 4-8 engineers. Running 1:1s, setting technical direction, and creating clear paths for individual development
• Foster a culture of rigor, fast iteration, and creative problem solving. Build a team where engineers are empowered to raise problems early and move from experiment to production without unnecessary friction
• Partner with recruiting to hire strong AI engineering talent and retain it through meaningful work and clear growth

Own Technical Delivery for Your Domain

• Drive the end-to-end delivery of AI features and systems within your team's scope, from design to deployment to post-production observability
• Be the accountable technical voice for your domain: scope estimates, architectural decisions, tradeoff documentation, and post-mortems all run through you
• Work closely with a product manager to translate customer problems and business priorities into a well-sequenced engineering roadmap

Stay Hands‑On at the Right Level

• Contribute meaningfully to system design, code reviews, and debugging when it matters with a focus on greenfield work, critical path systems, or when the team is blocked
• Set and uphold engineering standards for your team: testing strategy, evaluation frameworks, model observability, and responsible deployment practices
• Know when to write the code yourself and when your highest-leverage move is unblocking someone else

Build and Operate Production AI Systems

• Oversee the design and operation of LLM-powered features, ETL pipelines, agentic workflows, and/or document extraction systems
• Maintain a high bar for production quality: latency, cost, reliability, and behavioral consistency across a diverse multi-tenant customer base
• Build feedback loops and monitoring that detect model drift, degraded outputs, and edge case failures before customers do

Collaborate Across the Organization

• Work with peer engineering teams, platform engineering, and data engineering to share infrastructure, avoid duplication, and raise the AI platform's overall capability
• Communicate clearly to surface risks early, quantify tradeoffs, and clear a path to rapid development and iteration for you team
• Occasionally engage directly with customers, customer success, or implementation teams to ground your team's work in real-world usage patterns

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in machine learning, AI engineering, or applied data science
• 1-3+ years of direct people management or formal tech lead experience with responsibility for team delivery
• Hands‑on production experience with one or more of: LLM-powered applications, agentic workflows, document extraction pipelines, or classical ML systems
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with the modern AI engineering stack — LangChain/LangGraph (or equivalent), vector databases, prompt engineering, and model evaluation tooling
• Experience deploying and operating AI systems in a cloud environment (AWS preferred)
• Strong written and verbal communication skills — able to write a crisp design doc, run a productive design review, and give clear status to non-technical stakeholders
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in B2B SaaS, insurance, financial services, or another regulated vertical
• Familiarity with MLOps tooling
• Exposure to intelligent document processing, for example parsing PDFs, structured tables, or semi-structured data at scale
• Experience with LLM observability and AI gateway tooling (e.g., LangSmith, Helicone, Portkey, LiteLLM)
• Background building systems with human-in-the-loop workflows and agentic task orchestration

Why This Role

You’ll have real ownership — of a team, of a technical domain, and of shipped product used by insurance professionals across North America. You’ll have leadership who is fully committed to delivering real AI value to customers and invest in your growth. And you’ll be operating in an industry that is genuinely early in its AI transformation, with the data, infrastructure, and customer relationships already in place to make the work matter.

Additional Requirements And Details

• Travel required up to 10% of the time.
• Located and working from an office location.
• Occasional lifting and/or moving up to 10 pounds.
• Frequent repetitive hand and arm movements required to operate a computer.
• Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision (working on a computer, etc.).
• Frequent sitting and/or standing.

THE VERTAFORE STORY

Over the past 50 years, Vertafore has advanced the entire insurance distribution channel with the best software solutions in the industry. Today, we’re proud to say hundreds of thousands of Vertafore users rely on our solutions to write business faster, reduce costs, and fuel growth by increasing collaboration and streamlining processes. Vertafore leads the industry with secure, cloud-based mobile products that provide superior reporting and analytics, delivering actionable insight— right when customers need it most. We partner with other leading technology companies to deliver comprehensive solutions to improve the way our customers do business and serve their customers.

The Vertafore Way

• Bias to Action: We're united by an innate drive to take action and make a difference in the technology and insurance spaces.
• Win Together: We work together as one team, showing empathy and respect along the way.
• Show Up Curious: We work to challenge one another to push boundaries and think beyond the box.
• Say It, Do It: We honor every one of our commitments because integrity is important to us.
• Customer Success is Our Success: We cultivate authentic relationships and follow up by actively listening to their needs.
• We Love Insurance: We appreciate the impact insurance has on the world.

Vertafore is a drug free workplace and conducts preemployment drug and background screenings.

We do not accept resumes from agencies, headhunters, or other suppliers who have not signed a formal agreement with us.

We want to make sure our recruiting process is accessible for everyone. If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please contact [e-mail]

The selected candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

Vertafore strongly supports equal employment opportunity for all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law.

The Professional Services (PS) and Customer Success (CX)

bonus plans are a quarterly monetary bonus plan based upon individual and practice performance against specific business metrics. Eligibility is determined by several factors including: start date, good standing in the company, and actives status at time of payout.

The Vertafore Incentive Plan (VIP)

is an annual monetary bonus for eligible employees based on both individual and company performance. Eligibility is determined by several factors including: start date, good standing in the company, and actives status at time of payout.

Commission plans

are tailored to each sales role but common components include quota, MBO's and ABPMs. Salespeople receive their formal compensation plan within 30 days of hire.