Vice President, AI Innovation & Partnerships

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 and analytics, or a related discipline.
• Or equivalent experience acquired through accomplishments of applicable knowledge, duties, scope and skill reflective of the level of this position.
• 10+ years experience leading enterprise technology initiatives, AI/ML solutions, software engineering, cloud platforms, data and analytics, enterprise architecture, or technology strategy, including executive-level leadership responsibilities required.
• Demonstrated experience translating complex business opportunities into scalable technical solutions through AI, automation, advanced analytics, and emerging technologies preferred.
• Experience working within healthcare, managed care, or other highly regulated industries, including implementation of secure, compliant, and scalable AI solution preferred.

Pay Range: $207,000.00 - $392,100.00 per year

At Centene, we connect people to the care they need to live healthier lives — and the work you do here makes that impact real every day. You’ll take on meaningful challenges that directly support individuals, families, and communities, building your skills while making healthcare more accessible and effective. It’s work with a purpose you can see, backed by a team committed to improving lives well beyond the workday.

Centene offers a comprehensive benefits package including: competitive pay, health insurance, 401K and stock purchase plans, tuition reimbursement, paid time off plus holidays, and a flexible approach to work with remote, hybrid, field or office work schedules. Actual pay will be adjusted based on an individual's skills, experience, education, and other job-related factors permitted by law, including full-time or part-time status. Total compensation may also include additional forms of incentives. Benefits may be subject to program eligibility.

Centene is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to diversity, and values the ways in which we are different. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or other characteristic protected by applicable law.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered in accordance with the LA County Ordinance and the California Fair Chance Act