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This position within the AI Center of Enablement represents the apex of technical leadership for AI engineering across The Cigna Group, defining the future of AI engineering capabilities and making critical technical decisions with multi-year impact. The AI Engineering Principal serves as the organization's foremost authority on AI platform engineering, combining unparalleled technical depth with strategic vision, organizational influence, and the ability to drive transformational change in how the enterprise builds and deploys AI systems. This role establishes multi-year technical strategy for AI platform evolution, architects foundational platforms enabling hundreds of use cases, drives adoption of emerging AI paradigms across the enterprise, and shapes technical standards that influence hundreds of engineers and thousands of AI applications. The Principal shapes not only what the organization builds but how it builds, solving novel technical problems that lack industry precedent and building capabilities that differentiate the organization from competitors, ultimately helping improve the cost, quality and access to healthcare for Cigna's clients and customers for years to come.

As an AI Engineering Principal, you will engage broadly across Enterprise Architecture, Technology, Business Operations, and executive leadership, driving alignment of technical strategy with business objectives. You will design enterprise-wide AI infrastructure that balances innovation velocity, reliability, security, and cost, establish reference architectures that become organizational standards, lead transformational initiatives to modernize AI systems, and translate cutting-edge AI research into production engineering practices months before industry adoption. This role requires the highest levels of influence within the business, technology and architecture organizations, extensive business and domain knowledge, innovative problem-solving skills operating at the frontier of AI technology, and the ability to marry business and technology into a cohesive value-oriented strategy that guides the organization's AI capabilities for the next 3-5 years.

DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES:

+ Define multi-year technical strategy for AI platform evolution, anticipating technology shifts and business needs

+ Drive fundamental architectural decisions that shape the enterprise's AI capabilities for years to come

+ Identify and champion strategic technology investments that provide sustainable competitive advantage in healthcare AI

+ Establish technical principles and philosophies that guide AI engineering across the organization

+ Serve as principal technical advisor to executive leadership on AI engineering strategy, feasibility, and risk

+ Architect and drive implementation of foundational AI platforms that enable hundreds of healthcare use cases

+ Design enterprise-wide AI infrastructure on AWS that balances innovation velocity, reliability, security, HIPAA compliance, and cost optimization

+ Establish reference architectures and design patterns using Python, FastAPI, Pydantic, Terraform, and Podman that become standards across the organization

+ Create frameworks that abstract complexity and accelerate AI application development by 10x

+ Design sophisticated multi-model orchestration platforms that dynamically optimize across dozens of LLMs and SLMs using LiteLLM and custom routing logic

+ Architect enterprise-scale RAG systems incorporating neo4j graph databases, vector stores, knowledge graphs, and intelligent retrieval strategies

+ Build advanced agent frameworks supporting tool use, reflection, planning, and multi-agent collaboration

+ Implement cutting-edge techniques including model distillation, fine-tuning pipelines, synthetic data generation, and evaluation frameworks

+ Create observability platforms providing deep visibility into model behavior, performance, and cost using Langsmith and custom instrumentation

+ Architect cost optimization systems that reduce AI infrastructure spend by 50%+ through intelligent routing, caching, and resource management

+ Build security and compliance frameworks for AI systems addressing prompt injection, data leakage, adversarial attacks, and HIPAA requirements

+ Conduct research-level investigations into emerging AI capabilities and their enterprise healthcare applications

+ Translate cutting-edge AI research into production engineering practices months before industry adoption

+ Develop novel AI engineering techniques that solve unique enterprise healthcare challenges

+ Publish technical papers, patents, and open-source contributions that advance the field

+ Present at major industry conferences and represent the organization as an AI engineering thought leader

+ Build relationships with AI vendors (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral), research institutions, and technology partners

+ Set technical standards and engineering practices that impact hundreds of engineers using GitHub, containerization, and infrastructure-as-code

+ Mentor Senior Advisors, Advisors, and AI Architecture Principals on the most complex technical challenges

+ Drive cultural change in engineering practices, quality standards, and technical excellence

+ Lead enterprise architecture review boards for AI initiatives

+ Own availability, performance, and cost metrics for core AI platforms serving the entire enterprise

+ Design fault-tolerant, self-healing AI systems that maintain service during model provider outages or performance degradation

+ Establish chaos engineering practices and disaster recovery plans for AI infrastructure

+ Create automated evaluation frameworks that continuously assess model quality, bias, and safety

+ Collaborate with AI Architecture Senior Principals on enterprise-wide technical standards and patterns

+ Partner with AI Research Principals to establish pathways from research to production at scale

+ Work with AI Governance & Ethics Directors to architect responsible AI controls into platform foundations

+ Engage with executive leadership to align technical strategy with business objectives

+ Drive programs, initiatives and projects up and down the organizational hierarchy and support RFPs and client presentations by providing business-facing architectural input and ensuring enterprise mindset is present

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

+ Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Physics, or related technical field, or equivalent practical experience

+ 12+ years of software engineering experience with at least 6 years building production AI/ML systems at scale

+ Recognized expert in Python and AI engineering frameworks with contributions to open-source projects or technical standards

+ Extensive experience architecting AI platforms serving thousands of users or processing millions of requests daily

+ Deep expertise across multiple LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Llama) with understanding of model architectures and training

+ Mastery of AI orchestration frameworks (Langchain, Pydantic-AI, LangGraph) with ability to extend or build alternatives

+ Advanced expertise in RAG architectures including vector databases, neo4j graph databases, hybrid search, and query optimization

+ Expert-level AWS knowledge including AI services (Bedrock, SageMaker), infrastructure, and cost optimization strategies

+ Deep infrastructure-as-code expertise (Terraform) with experience managing complex, multi-account cloud environments

+ Comprehensive understanding of distributed systems, high-scale architecture, and platform engineering

+ Comprehensive knowledge of transformer architectures, attention mechanisms, and LLM internals

+ Expert understanding of model fine-tuning, RLHF, DPO, quantization, and inference optimization techniques

+ Deep expertise in prompt engineering including chain-of-thought, few-shot learning, and meta-prompting strategies

+ Advanced knowledge of embeddings, semantic search, retrieval strategies, and re-ranking techniques

+ Understanding of model evaluation frameworks, benchmark design, and quality metrics

+ Expertise in agentic systems including planning, tool use, reflection, and multi-agent orchestration

+ Strong grasp of AI safety including bias mitigation, hallucination detection, adversarial robustness, and red-teaming

+ Demonstrated history of leading transformational technical initiatives with multi-year, organization-wide impact

+ Proven ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams and drive adoption of new technologies

+ Track record of mentoring principals, senior advisors, and engineering leaders

+ Exceptional technical communication skills with ability to present to executive audiences and technical experts

+ Published technical content (papers, patents, major open-source contributions) demonstrating thought leadership

+ Experience driving technical strategy in ambiguous, rapidly evolving domains

+ Strong leadership, collaboration, and negotiation skills across technical and non-technical groups; able to lead by influence and build consensus at the highest organizational levels

+ Ability to build consensus among diverse stakeholders with competing priorities

+ History of making high-stakes technical decisions with incomplete information

+ Knowledge of IT strategic planning and capability development; experience implementing technology strategy and roadmaps

+ Deep understanding of AI and Generative AI technology frameworks and tools, and common patterns and best practices with their applications to business operations

+ Self-directed and execution focused with a "get things done" attitude

+ Comfortable with ambiguity and willing to take principled bets; able to think outside the box and challenge conventional wisdom regarding technology refresh and hype

+ Able to process high volumes of complex information; synthesize key themes, and recommend paths forward

+ Ability to communicate complex technical concepts to senior executives and stakeholders

+ Demonstrated continuous improvement and continuous learning mindset

+ Ability to foster a culture of openness, transparency, and inclusion

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

+ Master's degree or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related technical field

+ Experience building AI platforms at hyperscale organizations (Fortune 500, major tech companies)

+ Deep involvement in AI research community with published papers at major conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ACL)

+ Contributions to major open-source AI projects with significant adoption

+ Experience with model training infrastructure, distributed training frameworks, and GPU cluster management

+ Knowledge of advanced AI architectures (mixture of experts, retrieval-enhanced transformers, memory-augmented networks)

+ Expertise in AI security including adversarial ML, model extraction defense, and privacy-preserving techniques

+ Background in multiple AI domains (NLP, computer vision, recommendation systems, time series)

+ Experience advising startups, serving on technical advisory boards, or angel investing in AI companies

+ Patents or publications in AI/ML domains

+ Speaking engagements at major industry conferences

+ Experience in the Healthcare industry, particularly with exposure to benefits configuration, provider network management, claims adjudication and payment processing

+ Experience with common Healthcare data/transaction formats and standards such as HL7, FHIR, EDI, ICD, CPT

+ Experience working with Cloud and hybrid enterprise workloads

+ Deep practitioner of Agile and Lean Start-Up methodologies

+ Comprehensive knowledge of enterprise architecture frameworks, tools, and processes

If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10Mbps download/5Mbps upload.

For this position, we anticipate offering an annual salary of 149,000 - 248,300 USD / yearly, depending on relevant factors, including experience and geographic location.

This role is also anticipated to be eligible to participate in an annual bonus and long term incentive plan.

We want you to be healthy, balanced, and feel secure. That’s why you’ll enjoy a comprehensive range of benefits, with a focus on supporting your whole health. Starting on day one of your employment, you’ll be offered several health-related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well-being and behavioral health programs. We also offer 401(k) with company match, company paid life insurance, tuition reimbursement, a minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year and paid holidays. For more details on our employee benefits programs, visit Life at Cigna Group .

About The Cigna Group

Doing something meaningful starts with a simple decision, a commitment to changing lives. At The Cigna Group, we’re dedicated to improving the health and vitality of those we serve. Through our divisions Cigna Healthcare and Evernorth Health Services, we are committed to enhancing the lives of our clients, customers and patients. Join us in driving growth and improving lives.

_Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions including but not limited to lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital or familial status, genetic information, status with regard to public assistance, citizenship status or any other characteristic protected by applicable equal employment opportunity laws._

_If you require reasonable accommodation in completing the online application process, please email:_ [email protected]_ _for support. Do not email_ [email protected]_ _for an update on your application or to provide your resume as you will not receive a response._

_The Cigna Group has a tobacco-free policy and reserves the right not to hire tobacco/nicotine users in states where that is legally permissible. Candidates in such states who use tobacco/nicotine will not be considered for employment unless they enter a qualifying smoking cessation program prior to the start of their employment. These states include: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Washington State._

_Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner_ _consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances._