Associate Director, AI Solution Architecture

bcbsma; Boston (MA); On-site; USD 215,000 - 263,000; Full time

Job summary

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts in Boston seeks an Associate Director, AI Solution Architecture to lead the Enterprise AI and Solution Architecture group. You will translate enterprise AI strategy into coherent, production-ready architectures across business lines and geographies.

This role partners with AI Engineering to design agentic AI solutions, oversee multi-agent orchestration, and ensure secure, scalable deployments while mentoring a high-performing team.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in software engineering or solution architecture
• 3+ years designing large-scale AI/ML or LLM-based agentic solutions
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in a technical field or equivalent experience
• Hands-on cloud experience with enterprise-grade AI tooling and APIs
• Strong leadership and mentoring of technical teams
• Cloud architecture and secure, scalable design principles
• Experience translating business needs into technical blueprints
• Ability to present complex architectures to non-technical leaders

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and manage a team of AI solution architects.
• Partner with AI Engineering to translate business needs into robust blueprints.
• Architect agentic AI solutions with best practices for model selection, prompt orchestration, and RAG.
• Design multi-agent orchestration patterns for complex use cases.
• Ensure secure, scalable tool-use and API integration with enterprise systems.
• Embed ethics, fairness, and data privacy into AI solutions with Governance.
• Drive production-grade deployments and high availability.
• Communicate architecture value and design to executives and stakeholders.

Skills

Team leadership

Solution architecture

Agentic AI design

LLM/AI design

GCP/Vertex AI

API design

MLOps

Communication to leadership

Education

Bachelor's/Master's in CS or related

Job description

Ready to help us transform healthcare? Bring your true colors to blue.

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.

Minimum Education Requirements:

High school degree or equivalent required unless otherwise noted above

Location

Boston

Time Type

Full time
Salary Range: $215,010.00 - $262,790.00

The job posting range is the lowest to highest salary we in good faith believe we would pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the range may be modified in the future. An employee\'s pay position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, performance, shift, travel requirements, sales or revenue-based metrics, and business or organizational needs and affordability.

This job is also eligible for variable pay.

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.

Note: No amount of pay is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, or any other form of compensation that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company\'s sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company\’s sole discretion, consistent with the law.

WHY Blue Cross Blue Shield of MA?

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.