Senior Data & AI Engineer, Population Health Analytics

Vital Incite, an Alera Group Company, is searching for a Senior Data & AI Engineer to join their team!

Vital Incite is Alera Group’s population health analytics and consulting division, helping employers and advisors turn complex healthcare data into actionable insights. The team integrates medical, pharmacy, clinical, and other health data to identify cost drivers, improve health outcomes, evaluate program performance, and guide benefits strategy.

About Alera Group

Founded in 2017, Alera Group is one of the nation's leading independent insurance and financial services firms. We combine the strength of a national organization with the personalized service of local experts to help clients succeed across Employee Benefits, Property & Casualty Insurance, Retirement Plan Services, Wealth Services, and Human Capital Solutions.

Why Join Alera Group?

• Collaborate with purpose – Work alongside colleagues who believe the best results come from strong partnerships, shared expertise, and supporting one another.
• Build your career – Expand your expertise through meaningful work, continuous learning, and opportunities to grow across a national organization.
• Make an impact – Help clients navigate complex challenges while contributing to solutions that make a difference for their businesses, employees, and communities.

The Opportunity

The Senior Data & AI Engineer is a key member to help modernize and automate the data infrastructure supporting Vital Incite’s population health analytics platform. This role will initially focus on improving data quality, validation, ETL reliability, and BI readiness across complex healthcare datasets. Over time, the engineer will help build AI-enabled capabilities including anomaly detection, automated report analysis, clinical and financial insight generation, predictive analytics, file mapping, and intelligent workflow automation.

This position will report directly to the Senior VP of Technology at Vital Incite and have a dotted line to Alera Group's Center of Excellence (COE) for AI enablement.

Responsibilities

• Build automated data-quality and validation controls across healthcare claims, eligibility, pharmacy, biometric, wellness, and related datasets.
• Enhance and support SQL Server, stored procedures, SSIS/ETL pipelines, data transformations, and BI refresh processes.
• Develop configurable warning, failure, reconciliation, duplicate, and anomaly-detection rules.
• Improve monitoring, logging, exception handling, and root-cause identification across data pipelines.
• Automate file ingestion, schema validation, field mapping, and data normalization.
• Build reusable data services and APIs to support analytics and future AI applications.
• Partner with analysts and clinical teams to automate report review, insight generation, alert discovery, and population-health analytics.
• Develop AI-assisted capabilities using LLMs, machine learning, and statistical anomaly detection where appropriate.
• Maintain strong security, auditability, data lineage, and controls around PHI and sensitive healthcare data.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of data engineering or analytics engineering experience
• Advanced SQL Server and T-SQL skills
• Strong experience with ETL/data pipelines, ideally SSIS or comparable tools
• Experience with stored procedures, performance tuning, query optimization, and large datasets
• Experience with data validation, reconciliation, profiling, and quality-control frameworks
• Experience with Python for data processing, automation, APIs, or machine learning
• BI/data warehouse experience, preferably SSAS, Power BI, or similar
• Experience designing monitoring, exception handling, logging, and automated alerts
• API and structured-data integration experience, including CSV, Excel, JSON, and flat-file ingestion
• Experience with Git/source control and modern software development practices

Preferred Qualifications

AI Experience

The candidate does not need to be an AI research scientist but should understand how to apply AI safely and practically to business and data workflows. Preferred experience includes:

• LLM APIs such as OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, or equivalent
• Retrieval-augmented generation and structured LLM outputs
• Machine learning or statistical anomaly detection
• Prompt design and AI workflow orchestration
• Evaluation, hallucination controls, traceability, and human review
• Building AI capabilities on top of governed enterprise data

The longer-term roadmap includes automated report review, signal discovery, strategy generation, clinical storytelling, prediction, data validation, file mapping, and AI-assisted BI development.

Healthcare / Employee Benefits Experience

Healthcare and employee benefits experience is strongly preferred, including:

• Commercial healthcare claims and eligibility data
• Medical and pharmacy claims
• Member-level population health analytics
• Employer-sponsored health plans
• Healthcare cost and utilization analytics
• Clinical risk stratification
• HIPAA, PHI, and healthcare data privacy

Success KPIs

Within the first 6 to 12 months, this person should be able to:

• Improve reliability and visibility of the existing data-refresh process
• Automate high-value QA and validation controls
• Reduce manual data investigation and file-mapping work
• Create reusable data-quality and monitoring capabilities
• Establish a trusted foundation for AI
• Begin delivering production AI use cases from the population-health roadmap

Compensation

• Salary Range: $160,000–$170,000 annually
• Bonus Eligible: Yes

Benefits

Eligible colleagues enjoy a comprehensive benefits package that includes:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance
• Life and disability coverage
• 401(k)
• Generous paid time off
• Professional development opportunities

Work Arrangement

This position is Remote within the US.

We're an equal opportunity employer. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran or disability status, or any other protected class.

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