Vice President, AI Innovation & Partnerships

Centene; United States; On-site; USD 230,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

Centene seeks a senior leader to drive AI innovation, shape strategic technology partnerships, and translate complex opportunities into executable technical strategies.

You will work with business, data, engineering, security, and governance teams to deliver scalable AI solutions that improve outcomes and enterprise capabilities.

This role advises executives on capabilities, tradeoffs, and where to build, buy, or co-develop with partners.

Qualifications

• Requires a Bachelor's degree and 12+ years of leadership experience in AI, ML, and enterprise tech.

Responsibilities

• Lead AI innovation and high-value use-case initiatives with cross-functional teams.
• Define and oversee architecture, governance, and platform adoption for enterprise AI.
• Partner with vendors and internal stakeholders to co-develop scalable solutions.
• Influence product roadmaps and ensure interoperability, security, and compliance.

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

Position Purpose:

Leads Centene's AI innovation and strategic technology partnerships function, providing enterprise technical leadership for the highest-value AI use cases and shaping partner platforms/harnesses evolve to meet Centene's needs. Works directly with business, data, engineering, security, and governance leaders to manage complex opportunities where AI can materially improve outcomes, redesign workflows, or create new enterprise capabilities. Accountable for translating those opportunities into executable technical strategies, reference architectures, prototypes, and scaled solutions that combine Centene data and context with foundation models, agents, tools, and vendor platforms. Serves as the senior technical counterpart to business partners, influencing product roadmaps, defining joint development priorities, and ensuring vendor harnesses remain interoperable, extensible, observable, and aligned to Centene's AI control plane and enterprise architecture. Advises executive leadership on emerging AI capabilities, technical tradeoffs, partnership strategy, and where Centene should build, buy, partner, or co-develop.

AI Innovation and High-Value Use Case Leadership

Sets the enterprise agenda for data context and AI innovation, focusing resources on high-value use cases where advanced AI can materially improve member outcomes, operating performance, or medical cost management. Partners with executive business and technology leaders to frame complex problems, test whether AI is the right solution, and translate priority opportunities into clear technical hypotheses, target workflows, and measurable outcomes. Leads multidisciplinary teams through discovery, rapid prototyping, technical validation, and production architecture, balancing speed of learning with security, reliability, governance, and long-term maintainability.

Vendor Harness Strategy and Partnerships

Owns the technical strategy for Centene's use of vendor AI harnesses, defining the capabilities these platforms must provide and how they should integrate with Centene's data, context, identity, security, model, and observability services. Serves as the senior technical counterpart to strategic AI vendors, shaping joint roadmaps, co-development priorities, platform extensions, and commitments required to support Centene's highest-value use cases. Evaluates emerging vendor capabilities through technical diligence, architecture reviews, prototypes, and competitive testing, separating demonstrated capability from product claims and recommending where Centene should build, buy, partner, or co-develop. Drives the evolution of vendor harnesses toward open, composable, and portable patterns, including support for multiple models, reusable agents and tools, enterprise context, standard protocols and APIs, evaluation, tracing, cost attribution, and lifecycle controls. Partners with Procurement, Legal, Security, Enterprise Architecture, and AI Governance to ensure strategic agreements support technical interoperability, responsible AI, data protection, auditability, roadmap influence, and protection of Centene intellectual property and context.

Architecture, Engineering, and Scaled Adoption

Defines how priority AI solutions use Centene's AI control plane, agentic framework, AI Gateway, enterprise context layer, trusted data products, and existing engineering platforms. Establishes technical quality standards for prototypes and production solutions, including evaluation, testing, security, reliability, observability, model and prompt change management, and operational ownership. Works with platform and engineering leaders to identify gaps exposed by priority use cases and convert those needs into platform roadmap priorities. Ensures innovation efforts transition into durable products with clear ownership, support models, adoption plans, performance measures, and value tracking rather than remaining disconnected pilots. Maintains a disciplined view of the external AI market, identifies capabilities with strategic relevance to Centene, and runs focused experiments to determine when emerging technology is ready for enterprise use.

Executive and Team Leadership

Advises senior leadership on AI technology trends, architecture choices, vendor dependencies, investment priorities, and the practical implications of rapidly changing model and platform capabilities. Represents Centene in strategic technology partnerships and external forums, strengthening relationships with leading AI companies, startups, research organizations, and industry partners while bringing relevant learning back into the enterprise. Performs other duties as assigned. Comply with all policies and standards.

Education/Experience:

Requires a Bachelor's degree,12+ years of related experience, including significant leadership experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, enterprise architecture, technology strategy, product innovation, software engineering, cloud platforms, data