Principal AI Engineer (Agentic AI)

Humana; Louisville (KY); On-site; USD 172,200 - 236,900; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, and vision benefits

401(k) retirement savings plan

Paid time off including parental leave

Job summary

A leading healthcare company is seeking a Principal AI Engineer to guide enterprise platform strategy and engineering execution. This role demands over 10 years of experience in full-stack engineering, profound knowledge of Python, containerization, and cloud infrastructure. You will lead the development of AI platforms and work closely with various teams to elevate product effectiveness. The ideal candidate will have expertise in AI tooling and a proactive approach to engineering challenges. Competitive salary and hybrid work arrangement offered.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of total engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in Python, including building production services.
• Production experience with CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design and development of internal developer platforms for AI.
• Architect core infrastructure on cloud platforms.
• Build and maintain CI/CD for automated testing and deployment.

Skills

Expertise in Python

Cloud-native development

Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes)

CI/CD automation

Machine learning engineering

Generative AI tooling

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science or Engineering

Tools

GitLab CI/CD

FastAPI

Flask

GCP (Google Cloud Platform)

Job description

Overview

Become a part of our caring community and help us put health first. The Principal AI Engineer serves as a senior technical authority responsible for guiding Humana’s enterprise platform strategy and engineering execution, with a dedicated focus on agentic AI systems—AI solutions capable of autonomous action, complex reasoning, and orchestrating tasks across multiple environments. This role leads the design, development, and operation of foundational agentic AI platforms, tools, and services that empower development teams to build, deploy, and operate agent-driven applications efficiently, securely, and reliably. As a principal-level contributor, this position influences architectural direction for core infrastructure supporting agentic AI workloads, drives innovation in developer experience and automation—including agent orchestration and human-AI collaboration—mentors engineering teams, and ensures that platform solutions are robust, scalable, secure, and aligned with Humana’s enterprise agentic AI technology roadmap. The ideal candidate blends deep full-stack engineering expertise with hands-on proficiency in cloud infrastructure, automation, developer tooling, and advanced agentic AI platform capabilities—capable of shaping long-term vision while delivering high-quality, production-ready agentic AI platforms.

Platform Strategy & Architecture

• Lead the design, development, and evolution of internal developer platforms tailored for agentic AI use cases, focusing on self-service capabilities, intelligent automation, and an optimized developer experience for building and deploying AI agents.
• Define architectural patterns and best practices for infrastructure, agent deployment and lifecycle management, and operational excellence, ensuring security, scalability, and cost-efficiency across agentic AI workloads.
• Evaluate, select, and integrate foundational agentic AI technologies, including cloud-based agent orchestration frameworks, container orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools, agent workflow orchestration platforms, and observability solutions for agentic AI systems.
• Drive the adoption of platform-as-a-service (PaaS), infrastructure-as-code (IaC), and agent-as-a-service principles to standardize and automate environment provisioning, agent training, and agent serving.

Cloud Infrastructure & Agentic AI Operations

• Architect, deploy, and manage core infrastructure and platform services on cloud platforms (GCP preferred), leveraging agentic AI and ML services such as Vertex AI, Compute Engine, GKE, and Cloud Storage.
• Design and implement advanced networking, security controls, and access management (IAM) for agentic AI systems, supporting compliance and responsible AI guidelines.
• Establish and manage comprehensive monitoring, logging, tracing, and alerting systems for agent workflows, models, and applications, ensuring the reliability, performance, and health of both platform and hosted agentic AI solutions.

Developer Experience & Agentic AI Tooling

• Build and maintain robust CI/CD and agentic AI pipeline automation (e.g., GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, Kubeflow, ArgoCD) for automated testing, deployment, release management, and agent lifecycle management.
• Develop internal tools, APIs, and services that abstract agentic AI infrastructure complexity, enabling application and data science teams to self-service their agent/agent group training, deployment, and monitoring needs.
• Champion best practices for code quality, testing, security scanning, and automated deployments, integrating agentic AI-assisted developer tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Gemini CLI) into platform offerings.
• Provide guidance and support to engineering and data science teams on leveraging platform agentic AI capabilities to improve development workflows and operational posture.

Backend Engineering for Agentic AI Platform Services

• Develop scalable backend services and APIs using Python, specifically designed to power agentic AI platform functionalities and developer tools.
• Design and implement REST-compliant or gRPC endpoints with versioning, comprehensive error handling, and clear documentation (e.g., OpenAPI/Swagger) for agentic AI platform services.
• Architect database schemas and manage data persistence for platform metadata, agent artifacts, configuration, and telemetry data.
• Build secure, high-performance services capable of handling demanding internal agentic AI platform workloads.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner closely with application, data science, security, and operations teams to understand agentic AI needs, gather feedback, and evolve the platform to meet enterprise requirements for agent-based solutions.
• Contribute significantly to enterprise architectural decisions for agentic AI infrastructure and lead technical planning efforts for complex agentic AI platform initiatives.
• Conduct thorough code and agent review, define platform engineering standards, and champion best practices for reliability, security, and operability of agentic AI systems across teams.
• Clearly document platform architectures, agentic AI API specifications, runbooks, and critical technical decisions for knowledge sharing and maintainability.

Minimum Qualifications

• 10+ years of total engineering experience.

Required Qualifications

Use your skills to make an impact

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• 10+ years of professional software or platform engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in Python, including building production services and shared libraries used by others.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI systems, including LLM integration, RAG, embeddings, and applied generative AI patterns.
• Strong background in machine learning engineering, including model deployment, monitoring, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
• Expert-level understanding of FastAPI, Flask, or similar frameworks, and REST/gRPC service design.
• Strong proficiency with cloud-native development on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Minimum 5 years of containerization and orchestration experience (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Production experience with CI/CD pipelines, version control, and modern DevOps practices.
• Demonstrated ability to own large, ambiguous problems and deliver high-value, high-quality solutions.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience shaping engineering culture or influencing architectural direction across teams.
• Experience with generative AI tooling (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, PydanticAI, or similar).
• Strong understanding of deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Experience with distributed systems (Akka, Flink, or similar).
• Prior work building platforms rather than one-off applications.
• A track record of pragmatic decision-making, balancing innovation with maintainability and long-term value.

Additional Information

• This position follows a hybrid work style and must be performed at one of our designated IT hub locations: Louisville, KY; Tampa, FL; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA; New York City; or Washington, D.C.
• To Ensure Home Or Hybrid Home/Office Employees’ Ability To Work Effectively... Internet speed requirements and approvals apply as described in the original text.
• Humana will provide Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees with telephone equipment appropriate to meet the business requirements for their position/job.
• Work from a dedicated space lacking ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI / HIPAA information.

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.

$172,200 - $236,900 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, volunteer time off, paid parental and caregiver leave), short-term and long-term disability, life insurance and many other opportunities.

About Us

Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is committed to putting health first – for our teammates, our customers and our company. Through our Humana insurance services and 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, Medicaid, families, individuals, military service personnel, and communities at large.

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.