Lead Software Engineer - Enterprise AI Services & Agents

Wellmark-Blue-Cross-and-Blue-Shiel; Des Moines (IA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield in Des Moines, IA, seeks a Lead Software Engineer for Enterprise AI Services & Agents. This hands-on technical leader will design and deliver reusable enterprise assistants, agents, AI services, and agentic workflows, partnering with architects, security, governance, and product teams to translate business needs into production-ready solutions.

You will help establish enterprise blueprints, build reusable frameworks, and ensure secure, scalable AI delivery across

Qualifications

• Demonstrated leadership in designing and delivering complex software solutions.
• Experience with generative AI applications and enterprise-scale deployments.
• Experience with agent frameworks and orchestration technologies.
• Knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation and knowledge retrieval.
• Security, governance, and compliant AI practices in regulated industries.
• Strong collaboration and communication across product, architecture, and security teams.
• Experience building backend services and microservices at scale.
• Proficiency with cloud-native AWS infrastructure and IaC tools.

Responsibilities

• Lead design and delivery of reusable enterprise assistants and AI services.
• Partner with engineers, product leaders, architecture, and security to translate needs into solutions.
• Establish enterprise blueprints and engineering standards for AI workflows.
• Build reusable frameworks and components to accelerate governed AI delivery.
• Provide technical direction, code reviews, and mentoring to engineers.

Skills

Hands-on coding

AI services design

Enterprise API design

Cloud-native

Agile

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, MIS, or related field

Tools

AWS Strands Agents

Bedrock Agents

LangGraph

Retrieval-Augmented Generation

OpenTelemetry

Terraform

AWS CDK

REST APIs

Job description

Lead Software Engineer - Enterprise AI Services & Agents

• Full-time
• Department: Technology
• Pay Grade: 25

Why Wellmark: We are a mutual insurance company owned by our policy holders across Iowa and South Dakota, and we’ve built our reputation on over 80 years’ worth of trust. We are not motivated by profits. We are motivated by the well-being of our friends, family, and neighbors–our members. If you’re passionate about joining an organization working hard to put its members first, to provide best-in-class service, and one that is committed to sustainability and innovation, consider applying today!

Why Wellmark Technology?Wellmark is building innovative, modern solutions using cutting edge technology. We are driving organizational transformation and business strategy by empowering our technology team to innovate new and elegant solutions to enhance the customer experience. Together, we are leaning into the future, owning the outcome, and driving organizational change to transform how we work.

As a Lead Software Engineer on Wellmark’s Enterprise AI Services & Agents team, you will lead the design and delivery of reusable enterprise assistants, agents, AI services, skills, and agentic workflows. This is a hands-on technical leadership role that combines solution design, software engineering, customer engagement, and end-to-end accountability for secure, scalable, and supportable AI solutions.

You will partner with engineers, customers, product leaders, architecture, security, and governance stakeholders to translate business needs into production-ready solutions. You will also help establish enterprise blueprints and engineering standards for assistants, agents, agentic workflows, and AI evaluation, while building reusable frameworks and components that reduce duplication and accelerate governed AI delivery across Wellmark.

The team’s focus is to build business-facing AI capabilities once, harden them for enterprise use, and make them reusable across products, channels, portfolios, and business areas.

Preferred

• Demonstrated experience leading the design and delivery of complex software solutions while remaining hands-on with coding, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and production support.
• Hands-on experience designing, building, deploying, and supporting generative AI applications, enterprise assistants, agents, agentic workflows, or reusable AI services in production at enterprise scale.
• Experience with agent frameworks and orchestration technologies such as AWS Strands Agents, Amazon Bedrock Agents, LangGraph, or comparable frameworks.
• Experience implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation, enterprise or semantic search, knowledge retrieval, structured-data retrieval, document understanding, and tool-using AI solutions.
• Experience designing multi-agent or supervisor-agent patterns, including delegation, tool selection, orchestration, context and state management, exception handling, and human escalation.
• Experience integrating models, enterprise tools, data, and services through APIs or standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Experience developing AI evaluation frameworks using approaches such as golden datasets, scenario-based testing, LLM-as-judge, and automated regression testing to measure groundedness, citation correctness, response quality, safety, latency, and cost.
• Experience with AI observability and operations, including OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, prompt and response telemetry, quality monitoring, regression detection, audit evidence, usage measurement, and cost tracking.
• Strong experience building backend services, enterprise APIs, microservices, and distributed systems using RESTful, event-driven, or asynchronous patterns.
• Experience designing cloud-native solutions using AWS services and infrastructure-as-code tools such as AWS CDK, Terraform, or CloudFormation.
• Experience designing secure enterprise solutions that incorporate authentication, authorization, workload identity, data protection, audit logging, policy enforcement, guardrails, and appropriate human oversight.
• Experience building reusable frameworks, SDKs, libraries, templates, service contracts, test harnesses, or infrastructure components that accelerate delivery across multiple teams.
• Experience implementing automated testing at the unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end levels, along with CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Enterprise Actions or similar tools.
• Demonstrated ability to engage customers, translate ambiguous business needs into technical designs, communicate trade-offs, and influence decisions across product, architecture, security, governance, and engineering teams.
• Experience providing technical direction, conducting design and code reviews, mentoring engineers, and improving team engineering practices.
• Experience delivering solutions in healthcare, health insurance, financial services, or another regulated industry, including familiarity with HIPAA, SOC 2, privacy, compliance, or responsible AI practices.
• Strong problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills, with experience working in an Agile product-delivery environment.
• AWS certifications such as AWS Certified Developer, Solutions Architect, or Machine Learning Engineer are a plus.

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, MIS, or related field of study and at least 5 years of development experience (ex. Angular, NodeJS, TypeScript, C++, .NET, Java, SQL) OR 9 years of related and applicable experience.
• Strong analytical problem-solving skills. Accuracy and high attention to detail. Previous experience troubleshooting and developing creative technical solutions. Ability to provide innovative solutions to complex issues.
• Demonstrated experience in software development lifecycle methodologies.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate with and coach/mentor team members, while setting an example in maintaining a positive attitude, staying calm under pressure, being approachable, and respectful and taking responsibility for failures.
• Big picture thinker with the ability to translate the value of the Wellmark as a Service (WaaS) strategy to company strategy when making design and development decisions.
• Demonstrated, strong ability to gather information, perform necessary research needed for root cause analysis, problem definition and formulation, recommend solution implementation, verification, and ongoing optimization, using data to support recommendations.
• Demonstrated ability to build relationships to reach outcomes that gain the support and acceptance of all parties. Ability to communicate key information in a timely manner to the appropriate stakeholder audience with the ability to adjust communication style that will best suit the audience.
• Ability to thrive in fast-paced environment with changing priorities. Excellent organizational skills. Strong time management skills with the ability to set and meet established timeframes with little direction, while assuring data and information integrity.
• Eagerness to learn and stay current on industry trends and have a continuous learning mindset.
• Ability to collaborate and work as a team to accomplish goals and/or solve problems. Ability to earn trust and respect from peers, leadership, and stakeholders. Ability to learn by actively listening and applying coaching feedback.
• Ability to lead, support and work within a diverse development team model including global staffing, crowd sourcing, etc.

• a. Lead system development and engineering for highly complex programs. Coordinate the preparation, coding, testing, and debugging of complex programs; including the analysis and development of workflows that utilize emerging technology and meet and exceed Wellmark’s evolving business needs.
• b. Serve as subject matter expert in the implementation of innovative and cost-effective business solutions for multiple applications and systems utilizing information technology, business, and industry trends.
• c. Provide leadership, training, and guidance to others on the team in the gathering of information, necessary research needed for root cause analysis, problem definition and formulation, solution implementation, verification, and ongoing optimization. Ensure analysis of defects to find root cause and guide others in the identification of potential improvement opportunities.
• d. Mentor, guide and problem-solve with other technology areas in the development and implementation of solutions, including how to use new or enhanced software/applications.
• e. Coordinate with company resources to accomplish integration of products and processes and complex solutions. Provide timely and accurate results, and exceptional customer service.
• f. Utilize established relationships with Wellmark leaders and acts as a primary consultant on business status, issues, process improvements and technology enhancements or capabilities.
• g. Participate in project proposals, estimates and proof-of-concept activities as needed.
• h. Maintain awareness of industry’s best practices and standards and proactively participates in industry/knowledge reference groups relative to role. Provide direction for enterprise standards. Conduct code reviews and monitor standard adherence.
• i. Other duties as assigned.

An Equal Opportunity Employer

The policy of Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield is to recruit, hire, train and promote individuals in all job classifications without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, veteran status, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other characteristic protected by law.

Applicants requiring a reasonable accommodation due to a disability at any stage of the employment application process should contact us at [e-mail]

At this time, Wellmark is not considering applicants for this position that require any type of immigration sponsorship (additional work authorization or permanent work authorization) now or in the future to work in the United States. This includes, but IS NOT LIMITED TO: F1-OPT, F1-CPT, H-1B, TN, L-1, J-1, etc. For additional information around work authorization needs please refer to the following resources: Nonimmigrant Workers and Green Card for Employment-Based Immigrants

Wellmark supports and expects the responsible use of AI for our workforce! We welcome the responsible use of these tools by job seekers as well and are interested in learning from you; you will have an opportunity in the application process to share which tools you used and how you applied them.

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