Principal AI Architect: Enterprise-Scale Systems

Elevance Health; Costa Mesa (CA); Hybrid; USD 255,000 - 417,000; Full time

Job summary

Elevance Health in California is seeking a Distinguished AI Engineer to lead design, development, and deployment of large-scale AI systems across the enterprise.

You will drive modernization with agentic systems and LLMs, establish standards, mentor teams, and partner with engineering to accelerate AI-enabled software delivery. This role blends in-office collaboration with flexible, hybrid work.

Qualifications

• Requires a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field and a minimum of 15 years of experience in software engineering, deep expertise in distributed systems and large-scale architecture.
• Experience delivering production-grade AI/ML systems at scale, building agentic systems or complex LLM-based applications, modernizing large, complex legacy systems, and delivering high-quality systems.
• Strong programming expertise in Python, Java, or similar required.
• Deep experience with APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures, cloud platforms, and CI/CD and DevOps practices required.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deliver scalable, resilient AI solutions leveraging technologies such as agentic systems, large language models (LLMs), distributed systems, and event-driven architectures.
• Define enterprise-wide technical direction, including architecture patterns, integration standards, and reusable platform capabilities.
• Lead AI-driven modernization of legacy systems through automated code transformation, service decomposition, and continuous optimization.
• Design and implement AI-enabled software development lifecycle (SDLC) practices to improve engineering velocity and quality.
• Establish technical standards, governance frameworks, and best practices for AI systems, including monitoring, evaluation, and responsible AI.
• Partner with engineering teams and stakeholders to enable adoption of AI-assisted development and drive continuous improvement in system performance and productivity.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship while influencing enterprise technology decisions through deep expertise and hand-on engineering.

Skills

Python

Java

Distributed systems

LLMs

AI/ML systems

APIs

Microservices

CI/CD

DevOps

Leadership

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field

Job description

Elevance Health in California is seeking a Distinguished AI Engineer to lead design, development, and deployment of large-scale AI systems across the enterprise.

You will drive modernization with agentic systems and LLMs, establish standards, mentor teams, and partner with engineering to accelerate AI-enabled software delivery. This role blends in-office collaboration with flexible, hybrid work.