Principal AI Engineer

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Humana is looking for an AI Engineering Principal to serve as a senior technical leader within the Simplification Center of Excellence (CoE), driving the architecture, technology strategy, and delivery of enterprise-scale simplification capabilities. This role partners with senior executives and cross-functional teams to design secure, scalable solutions that enable workflow understanding, rapid prototyping, and high-impact service improvements across the organization. The Principal Engineer will translate complex business needs into clear technical roadmaps, establish engineering standards, and guide platform and integration decisions, while mentoring teams and fostering best practices. This leader ensures that simplification initiatives are built on durable, adaptable architectures that accelerate innovation, improve experiences, and support long-term enterprise success.

Program Summary

The Simplification Center of Excellence (CoE) is building a new enterprise capability that helps teams create simpler, more effective, and more human‑centered solutions for associates, members, patients, and providers. Joining this team means contributing directly to how the organization understands work today and builds better experiences for the future.

The CoE develops shared tools, methods, and guidance that support teams from discovery through delivery—bringing together process insight, research, ideation, rapid prototyping, and impact assessment to improve both speed and quality of outcomes. By establishing these capabilities, the team enables more informed decisions, stronger solution design, and greater confidence in what gets built and delivered.

This work involves designing and building the foundational systems that enable these capabilities—translating complex workflows and insights into scalable, reliable, and well‑architected solutions. Engineers on the team work closely with product, design, and research partners to prototype, test, and harden new approaches, while helping define technical standards, data flows, and extensible patterns that can be reused across the enterprise.

Position Overview

We are seeking an AI Engineering Principal to serve as a senior technical leader within the Simplification Center of Excellence (CoE), owning the technical architecture, technology strategy, and implementation of the CoE's core simplification and acceleration capabilities. In this role, you will act as a trusted technical advisor to senior executives, helping shape and drive enterprise‑wide service simplification initiatives that improve how work is designed, delivered, and experienced across the organization.

As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of scalable, secure, and extensible systems that enable discovery, workflow understanding, rapid prototyping, and solution validation. You will partner closely with product, experience, data, and engineering teams to translate complex business and operational needs into clear technical architectures, design patterns, and implementation roadmaps. Your work will ensure that simplification capabilities are reliable, and able to support high‑impact use cases across multiple teams and domains.

In this role, you will collaborate directly with senior leaders to align technical strategy with enterprise priorities, providing guidance on tradeoffs, sequencing, and long‑term sustainability. You will set technical standards for the CoE, influence platform and integration decisions, and help establish best practices for building and scaling shared capabilities across the enterprise.

As a senior technical leader and mentor, you will provide hands‑on leadership and coaching to engineers on the team, fostering strong engineering practices, thoughtful design, and high‑quality delivery. Through your leadership, you will help raise the technical bar of the organization while enabling faster, clearer execution—ensuring that simplification initiatives are grounded in sound architecture and built to endure.

Key Responsibilities

• Advise and make recommendations to senior IT and business leaders on areas for service simplification.

• Define and maintain system architecture and technology stack.

• Collaborate with product managers, designers, business intelligence engineers, and other stakeholders to make technical decisions, define technical requirements, and create development roadmaps in service of business goals.

• Conduct code reviews, provide constructive feedback, and promote continuous improvement in code quality and development processes.

• Mentor engineers and enforce best practices.

• Contribute hands-on across the stack.

• Collaborate with DevOps for CI/CD and cloud deployments.

• Participate in hiring and onboarding new team members.

Core Skills & Attributes

• Full-stack expertise (React, TypeScript, .NET/Java, Python).

• Cloud architecture (Azure/GCP), Kubernetes, Postgres.

• AI architecture (LLMs, Vector DBs, embeddings, prompting, agents).

• Test-driven development across unit, functional, integration, and UI testing.

• Systems thinking skillset.

• Passionate about continuously improving and simplifying customer experiences through human-centered design.

Use your skills to make an impact

Qualifications & Experience

• 10+ years software engineering experience; 3+ years in architecture/lead roles.

• Strong leadership, communication, and collaboration skills in a cross-functional product team. 2 or more years of experience leading people or projects.

• Demonstrated ability to work across product, engineering, operations, and delivery teams to align needs, opportunities, and solutions.

• Experience supporting or accelerating product development processes

Preferred Qualifications

• Enterprise security/compliance knowledge

• DevOps knowledge such as containerization and infrastructure as code

• Data engineering knowledge/experience such as ETL and data pipelines

• Human-centered design

• Interest or desire for pair-programming

• Understanding of training and deploying machine learning models

Additional Information

Qualified candidates are required to currently live in, or be willing to move to, a commutable distance for a hybrid (~3 days in-office) work arrangement. Locations include:

• Washington, D.C. metropolitan area

• Dallas, TX metropolitan area

• Louisville, KY metropolitan area

• New York City, NY metropolitan area

• Chicago, IL metropolitan area

Work at Home Criteria

To ensure Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees' ability to work effectively, the self-provided internet service of Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees must meet the following criteria:

• We recommend at minimum a download speed of 25 Mbps and an upload speed of 10 Mbps; we suggest a wireless, wired cable or DSL connection.

• Satellite, cellular and microwave connection leadership approves only if used.

• We will provide employees who live and work from Home in the state of California, Illinois, Montana, or South Dakota a bi-weekly payment for their internet expense.

• Humana will provide Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees with telephone equipment appropriate to meet the our requirements for their position/job.

• Work from a dedicated space lacking ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI / HIPAA information.

Interview Format

As part of our hiring process for this opportunity, we will use an interviewing technology called HireVue to enhance our hiring. Modern Hire allows us to quickly connect and gain valuable information from you about your relevant experience at a time that is best for your schedule .

Benefits

Humana offers a variety of benefits to promote the best health and well-being of our employees and their families. We design competitive and flexible packages to give our employees a sense of financial security—both today and in the future, including:

• Health benefits effective day 1

• Paid time off, holidays, volunteer time and jury duty pay

• Recognition pay

• 401(k) retirement savings plan with employer match

• Tuition assistance

• Scholarships for eligible dependents

• Parental and caregiver leave

• Employee charity matching program

• Network Resource Groups (NRGs)

• Career development opportunities

SSN Alert

Humana values personal identity protection. Please be aware that applicants may be asked to provide their Social Security Number, if it is not already on file. When required, an email will be sent from View email address on click.appcast.io with instructions on how to add the information into your official application on Humana’s secure website.

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.

$206,600 - $284,300 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

About Humana: Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is a leading U.S. healthcare company. Through our Humana insurance services and our 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 and Medicaid, families, individuals, military service personnel, and communities at large. Learn more about what we offer at Humana.com and at CenterWell.com.

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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.

Humana complies with all applicable federal civil rights laws and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or religion. We also provide free language interpreter services. See our