Lead AI Engineer

Humana Inc; Plano (TX); Hybrid; USD 171,000 - 235,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical benefits

Dental benefits

Vision benefits

401(k) retirement

Job summary

Humana Inc. in Plano, TX seeks a Lead AI Applied Engineer to own the architecture and build critical AI components for production systems. You will lead across LLM pipelines, retrieval, agentic workflows, and ensure reliability, auditability, and regulatory compliance in healthcare.

This role blends hands-on coding with technical leadership, guiding reviews, designing scalable solutions, and mentoring engineers.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including designing and operating production systems at scale.
• Proven track record of delivering AI-enabled products or platforms into production.
• Hands-on experience integrating and operating LLMs within business-critical workflows.
• Experience designing systems with structured outputs, tool calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and orchestration frameworks.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, design, and evolution of full-stack AI applications, including LLM pipelines and retrieval systems.
• Design scalable AI solutions prioritizing reliability, auditability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Lead technical design reviews and guide platform capability decisions.
• Define engineering standards for AI systems, including observability, testing, and latency optimization.
• Mentor engineers and collaborate with product, clinical, and operations teams to deliver compliant AI solutions.

Skills

Python

TypeScript/JavaScript

Distributed systems

Architectural leadership

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Kubernetes

Docker

PostgreSQL

Vertex AI / Gemini

React / Next.js

Job description

Become a part of our caring community

You have shipped AI products before. You understand the difference between a demo and a production system. You have strong opinions about evaluation frameworks because you have experienced the consequences of operating without them. You are at your best when you own architecture decisions while continuing to build and deliver critical code yourself.

We build the platform that transforms millions of clinical documents into trusted, actionable data. Our systems use large language models (LLMs) to read medical records, extract structured facts, answer complex questions with citations back to source documents, and route complex cases to human experts. The output of these systems supports healthcare decisions that impact real members.

As a Lead AI Applied Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for AI-enabled products and platforms, define architectural direction, establish engineering standards, and personally design and build the most critical components of our systems. You will lead through both technical expertise and execution, helping the team deliver reliable, scalable, and auditable AI solutions in a highly regulated healthcare environment.

Why Join Us

• Lead the architecture of production AI systems where LLMs are foundational to the product experience.
• Make key technical decisions regarding model selection, system boundaries, platform architecture, and build-versus-buy strategies.
• Own the highest-risk and highest-impact technical challenges involving reliability, explainability, and correctness.
• Influence engineering culture and establish standards that shape how the team builds and ships AI products.
• Work on systems operating at meaningful scale, processing millions of documents and supporting healthcare decisions across a large member population.
• Partner with highly skilled engineers while remaining deeply hands-on in coding, design, and production operations.
• Simplify complex solutions and drive pragmatic engineering decisions that maximize business value.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the architecture, design, and evolution of full-stack AI applications, including LLM pipelines, retrieval systems, agentic workflows, human-in-the-loop processes, and supporting platform services.
• Design and implement scalable AI solutions that prioritize reliability, accuracy, auditability, performance, and cost efficiency.
• Build and maintain the most complex and high-risk system components where architecture and implementation decisions have significant business impact.
• Define and enforce engineering standards for AI systems, including evaluation methodologies, structured outputs, observability, testing, fallback strategies, latency optimization, and cost controls.
• Lead technical design reviews and guide architecture decisions related to platform capabilities, AI systems, integrations, infrastructure, and software patterns.
• Evaluate and recommend technologies, frameworks, AI models, and third-party solutions based on technical and business requirements.
• Translate ambiguous business goals into clear technical strategies, roadmaps, and executable workstreams.
• Provide technical leadership across multiple projects, ensuring alignment with architectural standards and long-term platform objectives.
• Mentor and coach engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pair programming, and technical guidance.
• Partner with product, engineering, clinical, and operational stakeholders to deliver solutions that meet business and regulatory requirements.
• Own operational excellence, including deployment strategies, monitoring, incident management, and production reliability.
• Ensure all solutions comply with privacy, security, governance, and audit requirements within a regulated healthcare environment.

Use your skills to make an impact

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including experience designing and operating production systems at scale.
• Proven track record of delivering AI-enabled products or platforms into production environments.
• Deep hands-on experience integrating and operating LLMs within business-critical workflows.
• Experience designing systems that leverage structured outputs, tool calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agentic workflows, orchestration frameworks, and evaluation pipelines.
• Experience making architectural decisions for systems where AI is a core component of the product experience.
• Demonstrated success leading technical initiatives across engineering teams, including architecture reviews, technical planning, mentoring, and delivery execution.
• Strong programming skills in Python and/or TypeScript/JavaScript.
• Experience designing and operating distributed systems, APIs, data platforms, and cloud-native applications.
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering, system performance, scalability, and operational excellence.
• Ability to balance technical tradeoffs involving quality, latency, cost, security, and maintainability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience taking AI products from concept through production deployment and long-term operational ownership.
• Experience developing AI systems where LLMs are part of critical decision-support or operational workflows.
• Expertise in evaluation frameworks, benchmark datasets, regression testing, model quality measurement, and human review processes.
• Experience with agentic systems, Model Context Protocol (MCP), workflow orchestration, multi-step reasoning frameworks, and AI observability platforms.
• Experience with React, Next.js, modern frontend technologies, and full-stack application development.
• Experience deploying and managing workloads using Kubernetes, Docker, modern CI/CD platforms, and cloud-native technologies.
• Experience with Google Cloud Platform, Azure, AWS, Vertex AI, or comparable AI and cloud infrastructure platforms.
• Experience working in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, financial services, or government.
• Knowledge of privacy, compliance, security, and governance frameworks impacting AI and data-driven applications.
• Experience implementing AI-assisted development practices that improve engineering productivity and delivery speed.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and leadership skills.

Leadership Expectations

• Lead through technical excellence, sound engineering judgment, and hands-on execution.
• Establish standards that drive consistency, reliability, and quality across the engineering organization.
• Influence architectural direction while balancing innovation with operational stability.
• Foster a culture of ownership, continuous learning, mentorship, and accountability.
• Drive alignment across teams and stakeholders to ensure successful delivery of strategic initiatives.

Success in This Role

Successful candidates are passionate about building production-grade AI systems where correctness, transparency, and reliability matter. You enjoy solving difficult engineering problems, making thoughtful architectural decisions, and helping teams deliver high-impact solutions.

You are equally comfortable defining system architecture, mentoring engineers, reviewing designs, responding to production incidents, and writing code for the most critical parts of the platform.

Technology Stack

• TypeScript
• React / Next.js
• Python
• PostgreSQL
• Gemini on Vertex AI
• OCR and Document AI technologies
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• Modern CI/CD platforms and tooling

Additional Information

This role operates in a highly regulated environment. Responsible handling of sensitive and protected data is a fundamental requirement and a core part of our engineering culture. Success in this role requires a commitment to building secure, compliant, auditable, and trustworthy AI systems.

Work Style: This position follows a hybrid work schedule, requiring employees to work three days per week in the office and the remaining days remotely. Qualified candidates must currently reside within, or be willing to relocate to, a commutable distance from one of the talent markets.

Scheduled Weekly Hours

40

Pay Range

The compensation range below reflects a good faith estimate of starting base pay for full time (40 hours per week) employment at the time of posting. The pay range may be higher or lower based on geographic location and individual pay will vary based on demonstrated job related skills, knowledge, experience, education, certifications, etc.

$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.

Description of Benefits

Humana, Inc. and its affiliated subsidiaries (collectively, “Humana”) offers competitive benefits that support whole-person well-being. Associate benefits are designed to encourage personal wellness and smart healthcare decisions for you and your family while also knowing your life extends outside of work. Among our benefits, Humana provides medical, dental and vision benefits, 401(k) retirement savings plan, time off (including paid time off, company and personal holidays, paid parental and caregiver leave), short-term and long-term disability, life insurance and many other opportunities.

About Us

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 atHumana.comand atCenterWell.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, transfer, demotion, layoff, recall, termination, rates of pay or other forms of compensation and selection for training, including apprenticeship, at all levels of employment.

Humana complies with all applicable federal civil rights laws and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or religion. We also provide free language interpreter services. See our https://www.humana.com/legal/accessibility-resources?source=Humana_Website.