Lead, AI Platform Engineer

Lead, Ai Platform Engineer

At Humana, technology platforms are central to delivering secure, scalable, and innovative healthcare solutions that serve millions of members and thousands of healthcare providers nationwide. We are seeking an experienced and highly technical Lead, AI Platform Engineer to drive the strategic evolution of our engineering platforms, enabling high-performing product and AI teams to deliver transformative solutions that measurably improve member outcomes, streamline clinical workflows, and optimize operational efficiency across the healthcare continuum. This influential role combines deep technical expertise with substantial cross-functional leadership responsibilities. The Lead Platform Engineer will define forward-thinking architectural patterns, lead complex modernization initiatives that span multiple teams and systems, and ensure that platform systems consistently meet rigorous enterprise standards for scalability, reliability, security, and regulatory compliance within the demanding healthcare environment, where technology decisions have direct implications for patient care and business operations.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the comprehensive architecture and detailed design of enterprise platform services that support distributed healthcare applications and advanced AI systems, establishing technical standards and patterns that promote consistency, reusability, and operational excellence across multiple teams and business units while balancing innovation with stability.
• Define and implement industry-leading best practices for infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation), comprehensive CI/CD automation including automated testing and deployment pipelines, and secure cloud-native deployments that leverage platform-managed services, implement defense-in-depth security principles, and maintain compliance with healthcare regulations.
• Drive complex platform modernization initiatives including dependency upgrades across large service ecosystems, large-scale infrastructure improvements such as migration to next-generation cloud services, implementation of service mesh architectures, adoption of serverless computing where appropriate, and continuous refinement of development and deployment workflows.
• Establish and enforce reliability, resiliency, and observability standards across all platform services, including defining service level objectives (SLOs), implementing chaos engineering practices to validate system resilience, establishing comprehensive monitoring and alerting strategies, and creating robust incident response procedures that minimize impact to members and providers.
• Partner strategically with product teams, AI engineering teams, security architects, and compliance specialists to standardize service interfaces using well-defined contracts (e.g., OpenAPI specifications), develop shared platform capabilities that reduce duplication and accelerate feature delivery, and ensure all platform services provide the necessary guardrails for secure and compliant application development.
• Author comprehensive design documents, architecture decision records, and technical specifications that clearly articulate system requirements, design rationale, implementation approaches, operational considerations, and migration strategies, and lead thorough architectural reviews across teams to ensure alignment with enterprise standards and identification of potential risks.
• Mentor engineers at various experience levels through code reviews, pair programming sessions, technical discussions, and career development conversations, actively promoting consistent platform standards, engineering best practices, and a culture of technical excellence that attracts and retains top talent.
• Ensure all platform systems rigorously adhere to security best practices (e.g., least privilege access, encryption, secrets management), privacy requirements (e.g., data minimization, anonymization), and healthcare compliance requirements (e.g., HIPAA Security Rule, audit controls) through comprehensive security reviews, automated compliance checking, and continuous monitoring.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience demonstrated through significant contributions to large-scale production systems, recognized thought leadership in the platform engineering community, or progressive career advancement in increasingly responsible technical leadership roles.
• 7+ years of experience in platform engineering, infrastructure development, or distributed systems architecture, with a demonstrable track record of designing and implementing large-scale platform services that support multiple teams and applications while maintaining high availability and performance under production loads.
• Demonstrated ability to lead complex technical initiatives that span multiple engineering teams, requiring coordination across organizational boundaries, with full ownership from initial architectural design through production deployment, operational stabilization, and ongoing optimization based on real-world performance data and user feedback.
• Deep technical expertise in cloud-native architecture principles and patterns (e.g., microservices, event-driven architecture, CQRS), infrastructure automation using declarative configuration management, and container orchestration platforms including advanced Kubernetes concepts such as custom resource definitions, operators, service mesh integration, and multi- cluster management.
• Proven experience establishing comprehensive engineering standards including coding conventions, testing requirements, documentation expectations, and deployment processes, implementing robust CI/CD frameworks that support rapid iteration while maintaining quality gates, and instilling reliability practices within complex, highly regulated environments where change management and audit trails are essential.
• Strong background in scalable system design including distributed data management, caching architectures, asynchronous processing, event streaming, and microservices communication patterns, coupled with deep knowledge of performance engineering techniques such as load testing, performance profiling, resource optimization, and capacity planning to ensure systems can scale efficiently.

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated experience influencing technical direction across multiple teams, aligning diverse engineering stakeholders around shared architectural principles and strategic technology decisions, building consensus through data-driven technical arguments, and navigating organizational complexities to drive adoption of platform capabilities and standards.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills with proven ability to clearly articulate complex technical tradeoffs, present architectural proposals to senior leadership, document long-term platform strategy in a way that resonates with both technical and business audiences and facilitate productive technical discussions that lead to sound engineering decisions.

Additional Information

This position follows a hybrid work style and must be performed at one of our designated IT hub locations: New York City; Louisville, KY; Tampa, FL; Dallas, TX; Boston, MA or Washington, D.C.

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:

• At minimum, a download speed of 25 Mbps and an upload speed of 10 Mbps is required; wireless, wired cable or DSL connection is suggested.
• Satellite, cellular and microwave connection can be used only if approved by leadership.
• Employees who live and work from Home in the state of California, Illinois, Montana, or South Dakota will be provided a bi-weekly payment for their internet expense.
• Humana will provide Home or Hybrid Home/Office employees with telephone equipment appropriate to meet the business requirements for their position/job.
• Work from a dedicated space lacking ongoing interruptions to protect member PHI / HIPAA information.

Scheduled Weekly Hours: 40

Pay Range: $170,800 - $234,800 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

Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) is committed to putting health first – for our teammates, our customers and our company. Through our Humana insurance services and 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, Medicaid, families, individuals, military service personnel, and communities at large.

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.