Principal AI Architect & Platform Builder

Humana Inc; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 207,000 - 284,000; Full time

Job summary

Humana Inc. is seeking a Principal AI Applied Engineer to shape the long‑term AI strategy and hands‑on engineering across the company.

You will define architectures, drive model strategy, and ensure governance and reliability at scale. This role combines technical depth with cross‑functional influence, requiring expert Python/TypeScript, cloud-native design, and experience building AI platforms in regulated environments.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including large-scale distributed systems.
• Proven track record designing and operating production AI-enabled platforms or products at enterprise scale.
• Deep expertise in LLM technologies, AI platform design, RAG, agentic systems, evaluation methodologies, and AI operations.
• Extensive experience designing cloud-native architectures and scalable, resilient systems.
• Ability to define technical direction influencing multiple teams or product portfolios.
• Experience establishing engineering standards or platforms adopted across teams.
• Strong understanding of AI operational challenges including reliability, latency, cost, governance, observability, and risk.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive long-term technical strategy, reference architecture, and roadmap for AI-enabled products.
• Establish patterns and best practices for retrieval systems, LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, human-in-the-loop processes, evaluation frameworks, and governance.
• Lead organization-wide technical decision-making on model strategy, vendor selection, platform investments, and shared infrastructure.
• Design scalable architectures balancing reliability, performance, security, compliance, maintainability, and cost efficiency.
• Establish engineering standards for evaluation, observability, model lifecycle, responsible AI, and operational excellence.
• Build prototypes, proofs of concept, and reference implementations to de-risk emerging technologies.
• Lead cross-functional architecture reviews and mentor engineers through reviews and coaching.

Skills

Python

TypeScript/JavaScript

Large language models (LLMs)

AI platform design

Distributed systems

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related technical field

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Vertex AI

OCR/Document AI

Job description

Humana Inc. is seeking a Principal AI Applied Engineer to shape the long‑term AI strategy and hands‑on engineering across the company.

You will define architectures, drive model strategy, and ensure governance and reliability at scale. This role combines technical depth with cross‑functional influence, requiring expert Python/TypeScript, cloud-native design, and experience building AI platforms in regulated environments.