Senior AI & Enterprise Systems Engineer

Northwestern Mutual; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 137,000 - 205,000; Full time

Job summary

Northwestern Mutual hosts the New York Campus and seeks a senior engineer to lead the enterprise’s technical strategy and craft proofs of concept that validate the strategy. The role sits between engineering, architecture, and business, guiding architecture for new system classes and aligning architects, risk, and product owners to a common path.

You will write concise, senior-leadership-ready recommendations and build working prototypes to demonstrate viability.

Qualifications

• Seven+ years in software engineering, including experience inside a large, regulated organization.
• Expertise in systems and integration architecture: APIs, identity/authorization, systems of record, integration patterns, and vendor platforms.
• Experience shipping applications using large language model APIs, including tool use, structured outputs, retrieval, and multi-step agents.
• Ability to design evaluation for AI systems and interpret statistics.
• Production experience in Python and TypeScript, capable of delivering services, integrations, and user interfaces.
• Knowledge of cloud infra within enterprise guardrails and access through managed services (AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI).
• Ability to expose enterprise capabilities to agents via tool interfaces with least privilege.

Responsibilities

• Develop technical strategy for the enterprise's highest-uncertainty technology questions: what to build, what to buy, what to wait on, and what has to be true for each path to work.
• Design reference architectures for new classes of systems with a focus on authorization, data access, audibility, and regulated environments.
• Demonstrate business value, feasibility, and scale in every recommendation and state when an idea should stop.
• Build coalitions across enterprise architecture, risk, fraud, information security, legal, product, and operations.
• Write decision documents and lead working sessions to avoid stall due to disagreements.
• Scope proofs of concept as hypotheses with a success measure and a stopping rule, then build them as working software against real enterprise systems.
• Lead evaluation and enablement of non-deterministic systems: test sets, scoring, and model-risk monitoring in production.
• Evaluate vendor platforms and make build/buy/partner recommendations aligned with enterprise constraints.
• Maintain gap registers and readiness assessments for production handoff and short/long-term options.
• Present findings to senior leadership in writing and in short sessions; hand completed work to owning teams.
• Work daily with AI coding agents: set up repositories, tests, and harnesses, and critically review outputs.

Skills

Software engineering

Systems architecture

Python

TypeScript

API integrations

Security & privacy

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Azure OpenAI

Bedrock

Job description

Northwestern Mutual hosts the New York Campus and seeks a senior engineer to lead the enterprise’s technical strategy and craft proofs of concept that validate the strategy. The role sits between engineering, architecture, and business, guiding architecture for new system classes and aligning architects, risk, and product owners to a common path.

You will write concise, senior-leadership-ready recommendations and build working prototypes to demonstrate viability.