AI Engineer IV

AI Engineer IV at Premera Blue Cross

Our purpose at Premera Blue Cross is to improve customers’ lives by making healthcare work better. As an AI Engineer IV, you will contribute leadership within a team dedicated to developing AI/ML solutions for intricate business challenges, from initial concept through to production deployment. This pivotal role involves guiding the solutioning of sophisticated multi-agent systems, implementing cutting-edge retrieval techniques, and prototyping innovative AI products using advanced orchestration patterns.

With substantial experience in deploying AI systems and strong software engineering skills, you will be instrumental in ensuring the creation of reliable and maintainable AI infrastructure, leveraging protocols such as A2A and MCP. Your expertise will drive the development of innovative AI systems, actively mentor junior engineers, and champion the adoption of cutting-edge AI research and technologies for enterprise-scale agent platforms.

This is a telecommuter position, offering the flexibility to work from home.

What You'll Do

• Recommend and develop comprehensive multi-agent systems and enterprise AI systems for complex applications and products.
• Pitch concepts to team leadership and lead the construction of prototypes and minimum viable products to validate AI/ML solutions before committing substantial resources.
• Assist in designing and implementing the cloud architecture of large multi-faceted AI systems on Kubernetes using platforms like Azure AI Foundry with comprehensive agent governance.
• Assist in the design and scaffolding of robust data pipelines that drive large complex AI systems, including graph databases, tensor-based fusion, and multi-model retrieval.
• Develop specifications for enterprise-wide agent communication standards, tool governance, and evaluation harnesses to deploy AI models at scale.
• Develop the code for monitoring models and AI systems, including customer evaluation metrics, agent behavior analytics, and comprehensive drift detection that ensures consistent and reliable performance.
• Actively participate in a team that exercises principled, agile-like development practices.
• Create and maintain thorough documentation consistent with team procedures, corporate policies, and expectations, including architectural decision records.
• Ensure peer review on all assigned work, as well as conduct peer reviews over the work of others as requested.
• Guide and mentor junior AI engineers on AI/ML and industry best practices and methodologies, and emerging standards like A2A, MCP, and novel reasoning/retrieval techniques.
• Keep abreast of new tools and concepts through reading documentation or literature and actively practicing skills development.
• Advise team and division leadership on matters such as enterprise AI strategies, AI-related technology strategies and roadmaps, and AI-related infrastructure strategies and roadmaps.
• Meet and collaborate with external stakeholders to conceptualize AI solutions that realize business value while ensuring AI governance adherence, AI best practices, and data quality.
• Provide thought leadership to the Premera AI community.

What You'll Bring

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related field, or 2+ years of experience in a related, professional IT/analytics position.
• Minimum of 5 years of industry experience in developing, deploying, and maintaining AI or ML systems. Up to two years of industry experience may be substituted with an AI-centered Master’s/PhD degree or AI Engineering certifications.

Preferred Qualifications

• At least 4 years of experience in developing enterprise-scale multi-agent systems using advanced orchestration and evaluation frameworks.
• Previous experience with novel fusion techniques (TRF, learned rankers) and production GraphRAG at scale.
• Experience implementing enterprise AI systems with comprehensive governance, security, and compliance features.
• Publications, patents, or significant open-source contributions in agent architectures or advanced retrieval systems.
• Minimum of 4 years of experience in successfully productionizing AI models, including constructing scalable data pipelines and establishing robust monitoring systems.
• At least 5 years working within agile-like teams and environments.

Knowledge, Skills, And Abilities

• Mastery of complex multi-agent architectures including distributed orchestration.
• Expert knowledge of advanced fusion methods (TRF, tensor-based ranking).
• Ability to design enterprise-scale RAG systems with comprehensive governance.
• Deep expertise in agent evaluation and benchmarking methodologies.
• Proficiency in implementing agent safety systems and attack mitigation.
• Advanced knowledge of graph-augmented retrieval and ontology alignment.
• Experience with multi-modal agent systems and embeddings.
• Ability to design agent communication standards and protocols.
• Expertise in token optimization and cost management at scale.
• Knowledge of agent pool management and scale-to-zero architectures.
• Experience with agent simulation and testing frameworks.
• Ability to mentor teams on cutting-edge AI engineering practices.
• Understanding of regulatory compliance for agentic AI systems.
• Ability to articulate the technical details and tradeoffs of AI solutions to non-technical stakeholders in a clear and concise manner.

Premera Total Rewards

Premera's comprehensive total rewards package provides support, resources, and opportunities to help employees thrive and grow. Our total rewards are more than a collection of perks; they're a reflection of our commitment to your health and well-being. We offer a broad array of rewards including physical, financial, emotional, and community benefits, including:

• Medical, vision, and dental coverage with low employee premiums.
• Voluntary benefit offerings, including pet insurance for paw parents.
• Life and disability insurance.
• Retirement programs, including a 401K employer match and a pension plan that is vested after 3 years of service.
• Wellness incentives with a wide range of mental well-being resources for you and your dependents, including counseling services, stress management programs, and mindfulness programs.
• Generous paid time off to reenergize.
• Tuition assistance for both undergraduate and graduate degrees.
• Employee recognition program to celebrate anniversaries, team accomplishments, and more.

Key skills/competency

• Multi-agent Systems
• AI/ML Solutions
• Orchestration Patterns
• Retrieval Techniques
• Cloud Architecture (Kubernetes, Azure AI Foundry)
• Data Pipelines
• Graph Databases
• AI Governance
• Monitoring and Drift Detection
• Agile Development