Lead Software Engineer - Enterprise AI Services & Agents

Wellmark•Des Moines, IA

About The Position

As a Lead Software Engineer on Wellmark’s Enterprise AI Services & Agents team, you will lead the design and delivery of reusable enterprise assistants, agents, AI services, skills, and agentic workflows. This hands-on technical leadership role combines solution design, software engineering, customer engagement, and end-to-end accountability for secure, scalable, and supportable AI solutions. You will partner with engineers, customers, product leaders, architecture, security, and governance stakeholders to translate business needs into production-ready solutions. You will help establish enterprise blueprints and engineering standards for assistants, agents, agentic workflows, and AI evaluation, while building reusable frameworks and components that reduce duplication and accelerate governed AI delivery across Wellmark. The team builds business-facing AI capabilities once, hardens them for enterprise use, and makes them reusable across products, channels, portfolios, and business areas. Wellmark is a mutual insurance company serving policyholders across Iowa and South Dakota. It emphasizes member well-being, best-in-class service, sustainability, innovation, and the development of modern technology solutions.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, MIS, or a related field and at least 5 years of development experience, or 9 years of related and applicable experience.
Development experience with technologies such as Angular, NodeJS, TypeScript, C++, .NET, Java, or SQL.
Strong analytical problem-solving skills, accuracy, and attention to detail.
Experience troubleshooting and developing creative technical solutions, with the ability to address complex issues innovatively.
Demonstrated experience with software development lifecycle methodologies.
Ability to communicate with and coach or mentor team members, maintain a positive and respectful approach, stay calm under pressure, and take responsibility for failures.
Ability to consider the broader business strategy and translate the value of Wellmark as a Service (WaaS) strategy into design and development decisions.
Ability to research and perform root-cause analysis, define problems, recommend solutions, verify implementation, and optimize outcomes using data to support recommendations.
Ability to build relationships and gain support and acceptance from stakeholders.
Ability to communicate important information promptly to appropriate stakeholders and adapt communication to the audience.
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with changing priorities.
Excellent organizational skills and strong time management, including meeting timeframes with little direction while maintaining data and information integrity.
Eagerness to learn, keep current with industry trends, and maintain a continuous-learning mindset.
Ability to collaborate and work as part of a team to accomplish goals and solve problems.
Ability to earn trust and respect from peers, leadership, and stakeholders.
Ability to listen actively, learn, and apply coaching feedback.
Ability to lead, support, and work within a diverse development team model, including global staffing and crowdsourcing.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience leading the design and delivery of complex software solutions while contributing to coding, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and production support.
Experience designing, building, deploying, and supporting production generative AI applications, enterprise assistants, agents, agentic workflows, or reusable AI services at enterprise scale.
Experience with agent frameworks and orchestration technologies such as AWS Strands Agents, Amazon Bedrock Agents, LangGraph, or comparable frameworks.
Experience with Retrieval-Augmented Generation, enterprise or semantic search, knowledge retrieval, structured-data retrieval, document understanding, and tool-using AI solutions.
Experience designing multi-agent or supervisor-agent patterns, including delegation, tool selection, orchestration, context and state management, exception handling, and human escalation.
Experience integrating models, enterprise tools, data, and services through APIs or standards such as Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Experience developing AI evaluation frameworks using golden datasets, scenario-based testing, LLM-as-judge, and automated regression testing to assess groundedness, citation correctness, response quality, safety, latency, and cost.
Experience with AI observability and operations, including OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, prompt and response telemetry, quality monitoring, regression detection, audit evidence, usage measurement, and cost tracking.
Strong experience building backend services, enterprise APIs, microservices, and distributed systems using RESTful, event-driven, or asynchronous patterns.
Experience designing cloud-native solutions with AWS services and infrastructure-as-code tools such as AWS CDK, Terraform, or CloudFormation.
Experience designing secure enterprise solutions involving authentication, authorization, workload identity, data protection, audit logging, policy enforcement, guardrails, and human oversight.
Experience building reusable frameworks, SDKs, libraries, templates, service contracts, test harnesses, or infrastructure components for use across multiple teams.
Experience implementing unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Enterprise Actions or similar tools.
Demonstrated ability to engage customers, translate ambiguous business needs into technical designs, communicate trade-offs, and influence product, architecture, security, governance, and engineering teams.
Experience providing technical direction, conducting design and code reviews, mentoring engineers, and improving team engineering practices.
Experience delivering solutions in healthcare, health insurance, financial services, or another regulated industry, including familiarity with HIPAA, SOC 2, privacy, compliance, or responsible AI practices.
Experience working in an Agile product-delivery environment.
AWS certifications such as AWS Certified Developer, Solutions Architect, or Machine Learning Engineer.

Responsibilities

Lead system development and engineering for highly complex programs.
Coordinate preparation, coding, testing, and debugging of complex programs, including analysis and development of workflows using emerging technology.
Serve as a subject matter expert in implementing innovative, cost-effective business solutions across applications and systems.
Provide leadership, training, and guidance on root-cause analysis, problem definition, solution implementation, verification, and ongoing optimization.
Analyze defects to identify root causes and guide others in finding improvement opportunities.
Mentor, guide, and problem-solve with other technology areas during solution development and implementation.
Coordinate company resources to integrate products, processes, and complex solutions, delivering timely and accurate results and exceptional customer service.
Consult with Wellmark leaders on business status, issues, process improvements, and technology enhancements or capabilities.
Participate in project proposals, estimates, and proof-of-concept activities as needed.
Maintain awareness of industry best practices and standards, participate in industry and knowledge groups, and provide direction for enterprise standards.
Conduct code reviews and monitor adherence to standards.
Lead the design and delivery of reusable enterprise assistants, agents, AI services, skills, and agentic workflows.
Partner with engineering, customer, product, architecture, security, and governance stakeholders to turn business needs into production-ready solutions.
Establish enterprise blueprints and engineering standards for AI assistants, agents, agentic workflows, and evaluation.
Build reusable frameworks and components that reduce duplication and accelerate governed AI delivery.