Principal AI Platform Engineer

Principal Ai Platform Engineer

At PEMCO, we're all about people – our customers, our employees, and the community. We're a mutual insurance company owned by our Northwest policyholders. We provide auto, home, renters, and boat coverage. Recognized by Forbes as one of America's Best Insurance Companies in both Auto and Home for 2025, based on customer survey feedback, and by Newsweek as one of America's Greatest Midsize Workplaces 2025. We are consistently recognized for our outstanding customer service, employee expertise, community partnerships, and social impact programs. All of which makes PEMCO a great place to work!

Our social impact programs motivate high achievement by youth in education; build stronger and greener communities; and increase safety at home, on the road, and at play. We're committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and to fostering an inspiring and inclusive workplace. These efforts create and cultivate an environment that builds fairness and understanding, encourages collaboration and flexibility, and celebrates all the ways in which we're different and the same – enabling all individuals to achieve their full potential.

We are seeking a Principal AI Platform Engineer, to join our community. As AI agents become mission-critical in production business workflows, PEMCO needs a leader who owns the operational reliability, governance, security, and cost management of the AI layer. In year one, this is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will build systems yourself while establishing the standards and governance framework. As AI operations mature, you will build and scale a team to match operational demands.

The role spans both business AI use cases (in partnership with the Data, AI & Digital teams) and technology enablement use cases including IT operations, information security, help desk automation. You will be responsible for building and maintaining the enterprise agent marketplace, establishing production-grade observability, and ensuring governance and compliance across all AI deployments.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Own the operational lifecycle of AI agents deployed across PEMCO: deployment, monitoring, scaling, incident response, and retirement.
• Build and maintain observability for the AI layer, including cost tracking, latency, error rates, model performance, token usage, and production monitoring for agent workers.
• Manage agent orchestration infrastructure, including configuration, versioning, connection management, and tool registration. Current stack includes MCP-based orchestration and Azure OpenAI services.
• Establish runbooks and incident response procedures for AI agent failures. When an agent supporting a business workflow goes down, this role owns the recovery.
• Implement prompt governance controls and role-based model access per Information Security standards: PII exposure monitoring, prompt injection detection, and access enforcement. Contribute requirements and technical capabilities to InfoSec for AI-specific policy development.
• Build the enterprise agent marketplace: deploy and manage AI agents within an enterprise UI framework, ensuring discoverability, versioning, and access controls.
• Evaluate new model releases, track capability evolution, and make recommendations on model selection. Maintain a knowledge management layer for AI operations including decision logs, model inventories, and governance documentation.
• Contribute directly to AI governance and the AI Governance Working Group. Operationalize security, governance, and compliance standards defined by Information Security and Data & AI leadership across all AI deployments.
• Optimize AI infrastructure costs through model selection, caching strategies, batching, and token budget management.
• Partner with the Data & AI team on production readiness for models and agents. Data & AI owns model development, training, and AI governance policy. This role owns the operational deployment, monitoring, fallback behavior, graceful degradation, and knowledge layer integration.
• As the function matures, define team structure, secure headcount, and build a team.
• Demonstrate behaviors consistent with PEMCO's policies, values, code of ethics, and business conduct.
• Authentically support the PEMCO Brand and constantly are on the lookout for top talent to join us to achieve our Mission to Worry Less and Live More.
• Other duties as assigned.

What You'll Bring:

• Technical degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 5+ years in a technical operations, platform engineering, or SRE leadership role is required
• 2+ years building and deploying AI agents in production environments, including AI/ML ops (model monitoring, feature store management, RAG, vector store enablement) is required
• Experience with cloud AI services (Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, or comparable) is required
• Experience building observability and monitoring for production services is required
• Experience with identity and access management for technical platforms is required
• Demonstrated understanding of AI security risks: prompt injection, data leakage, model abuse is required
• Experience leading or building a technical team is required
• Experience with agent orchestration frameworks (MCP, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, or similar)
• Experience with LLM operational patterns: token management, caching, rate limiting, fallback strategies
• Experience in a regulated industry (financial services, insurance, healthcare)
• Experience with cost optimization for cloud AI consumption
• Familiarity with AI governance frameworks (NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, or internal frameworks)
• Experience building or operating an internal AI agent marketplace or enterprise AI access layer
• Cloud platform certifications preferred (Azure, AWS, or GCP)
• AI/ML certifications preferred but not required
• Job Specific: Translates between data teams and infrastructure teams. Comfortable in both conversations.
• Job Specific: Comfortable operating in startup mode within an established organization. Delivers value incrementally while building toward a mature platform.
• Interpersonal Skills & Empathy: Builds relationships and gets results through influence rather than authority.
• Independent: Is highly self-motivated and self-directed. The ability to work with limited direction and communicate relevant information to the appropriate levels during times of uncertainty
• MS Office: Skilled proficiency in Excel, Word, Outlook
• Precision: Is detail orientated and has a strong desire for accuracy and thoroughness
• Communicator: The ability to communicate clearly and informatively, verbally and in writing, with colleagues, customers, and the community in both technical and non-technical professional language
• Leadership & Managing Others: Establishes and communicates a compelling and inspiring vision, creates winning strategies and plans, ensures team goals are aligned with company goals; develops both self and others is required.

Compensation:

The pay range for this role is shown below. Compensation decisions are determined based on an individual's qualifications, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.

• Greater Seattle area target pay range: $154,845-$189,255. The full pay range is $129,038-$215,063.
• Outside Greater Seattle area target pay range: $136,654-$167,022. The full pay range is $113,879-$189,797.

Greater Seattle Area is defined as working within approximately 100 miles of Seattle. Outside Greater Seattle is defined as working approximately 100 miles or more from Seattle.

Benefits:

Regular part-time PEMCO employees working at least 24 hours per week and regular full-time PEMCO employees are eligible to elect coverage under medical, dental, and vision plans for themselves and their eligible family members with generous employer premium cost shares. In addition, as a benefits-eligible employee, you are:

• covered by employer-paid basic life and accidental death & dismemberment insurance policies as well as long- and short-term disability benefit coverages.
• eligible to participate in PEMCO's 401(k) plan, which includes a generous employer match (2 for 1 on the first 6% employee pre-tax and/or Roth deferral, up to federal maximums).

PEMCO provides the following paid leave programs for benefits-eligible employees in their first year of PEMCO employment:

• Vacation accrues at a minimum rate of 10 days for new hires and increases based on a schedule to a maximum annual accrual of 25 days based on tenure.
• Granted four (4) floating holidays immediately upon hire.
• Paid holidays for the eight (8) holidays observed by PEMCO throughout the calendar year.