Associate Director, AI Solution Architecture

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts Inc.; Boston (MA); Hybrid; USD 215,000 - 263,000; Full time

Job summary

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is seeking an Associate Director, AI Solution Architecture in Boston. The role leads the Enterprise AI solution architecture group, translating AI strategy into scalable, governed architectures across geographies.

You will oversee agentic AI solutions, ensure secure integration with enterprise APIs, and drive production-grade deployments while mentoring a team of architects and collaborating with AI engineering to deliver high-impact use cases.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or related field (or equivalent practical experience).
• 8+ years in software engineering or solution architecture; 3+ years leading teams of architects or designers.
• Hands-on with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, Vertex AI Agent Builder, Vertex AI Search, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, Cloud Run.

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of AI solution architects.
• Translate enterprise AI strategy into coherent, production-viable architectures spanning business lines and geographies.
• Architect agentic AI solutions with best practices for model selection, prompt orchestration, RAG and multi-agent patterns.

Job description

Ready to help us transform healthcare? Bring your true colors to blue. This role has an in office expectation of 2X a week in our Boston location. We are in the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. We are looking for an Associate Director, AI Solution Architecture to lead our Enterprise AI and Solution Architecture group. In this leadership role, you will translate enterprise AI strategy into coherent, governed, and production-viable solution architectures that span business lines, platforms, and geographies. This role does not build the core platform or own feature delivery; rather, you will define how AI capabilities are assembled into complete, end-to-end business solutions. Operating as a critical technical peer to the AI engineering and delivery function, you will bridge the gap between complex business needs and scalable architecture to drive the adoption of intelligent AI assistants and agentic workflows across the enterprise.

What You'll Do

• Team Leadership & Mentorship: Lead, mentor, and manage a high-performing team of AI solution architects, providing technical guidance, architectural oversight, and career development.
• Solution Design & Engineering Partnership: Partner with the AI Engineering team to conduct business needs assessments and identify high-impact agentic use cases. Translate complex business requirements into robust, scalable technical blueprints that enable production-grade engineering delivery.
• Architect Agentic Solutions: Oversee the architectural design of AI assistants, establishing enterprise best practices for model selection, prompt orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent orchestration.
• Multi-Agent Orchestration: Guide the design of intelligent, multi-step AI agents, defining patterns for sequential, loop, parallel, and hierarchical architectures to handle multi-turn, multi-domain use cases.
• System Integration: Architect secure, scalable tool-use and function-calling patterns, ensuring AI agents connect seamlessly to enterprise APIs, databases, and third-party systems.
• Responsible AI & Governance: Partner with AI Governance to structurally embed ethical considerations, fairness, transparency, hallucination mitigation, and strict data privacy into all AI solutions.
• Production Scalability: Design highly available, production-grade solutions, collaborating closely with engineering leads to ensure architectural concepts translate into reliable, high-performance deployments.
• Communication: Serve as the primary architectural liaison, effectively articulating the value, mechanics, and design of agentic AI solutions to non-technical business leaders and executive stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Data Science, or a related technical field (or equivalent practical experience).
• Experience: 8+ years in software engineering or solution architecture, with 3+ years specifically focused on designing large-scale AI/ML or LLM-based agentic solutions.
• Leadership: 3+ years of experience directly managing and leading teams of technical architects or systems designers.
• Cloud Expertise: Hands‑on architectural experience with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) services, including Vertex AI Agent Builder, Vertex AI Search, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and Cloud Run.
• AI Architecture: Proven expertise in designing solution architectures leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), including RAG, embeddings, complex function calling, and multi‑agent frameworks.
• Integration & Systems: Strong command of API design, microservices, cloud-native development patterns, and integrating AI capabilities into existing enterprise product ecosystems.
• MLOps Foundations: Solid knowledge of MLOps practices, including designing frameworks to measure and monitor LLM quality, latency, and cost in production.
• Communication: Exceptional ability to translate ambiguous business problems into structured technical architectures and present them clearly to diverse audiences.

Preferred Qualifications

• Certifications: Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect or Professional Machine Learning Engineer.
• Advanced AI Orchestration: Deep exposure to designing architecture for autonomous tool-use patterns and frameworks such as Google ADK, LangChain, or LlamaIndex.
• Data Retrieval: Experience integrating and scaling enterprise vector databases (e.g., Vertex AI Vector Search, AlloyDB, Pinecone) for high-performance, embedding-based retrieval.
• Regulated Industries: Experience working in healthcare, insurance, or finance, with a strong understanding of data privacy frameworks (e.g., HIPAA) and compliance requirements in solution design.

Location Boston

Location Boston Time Type Full time Salary Range: $215,010.00 - $262,790.00

We offer comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, medical/dental/vision insurance, 401(k), and a suite of well‑being benefits to eligible employees.

At Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts, we believe in wellness and that work/life balance is a key part of associate wellbeing. For more information on how we work and support that work/life balance visit our "How We Work" Page. Voted as the highest in member satisfaction among Massachusetts commercial health plans by JD Power, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is a community-focused, tax-paying, not-for-profit health plan headquartered in Boston. We have been a market leader for over 75 years, and are consistently ranked among the nation’s best health plans. Our daily efforts are dedicated to effectively serving our 2.8 million members, and consistently offering security, stability, and peace of mind to both our members and associates.

Our Commitment to You

We are committed to investing in your development and providing the necessary resources to enable your success. We are dedicated to creating a refreshing and rewarding workplace that promotes excellence and provides opportunities for employees to forge their unique career path. We take pride in our diverse, community-centric, wellness-focused culture and believe every member of our team deserves to enjoy a positive work-life balance.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts is an Equal Employment Employer - veterans/disability.

Applicants are considered for all positions without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristics protected by law.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts will not discharge or in any other manner discriminate against employees or applicants because they have inquired about, discussed, or disclosed their own pay or the pay of another employee or applicant. However, employees who have access to the compensation information of other employees or applicants as a part of their essential job functions cannot disclose the pay of other employees or applicants to individuals who do not otherwise have access to compensation information, unless the disclosure is (a) in response to a formal complaint or charge, (b) in furtherance of an investigation, proceeding, hearing, or action, including an investigation conducted by the employer, or (c) consistent with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts's legal duty to furnish information.