Lead Software Engineer - Enterprise AI Services & Agents

Wellmark, Inc.•Des Moines, IA

2d•Hybrid

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 work 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 to 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. The role also leads system development and engineering for highly complex programs, serves as a subject matter expert, and provides technical direction, training, and guidance to others.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, MIS, or a related field and at least 5 years of development experience (for example, Angular, NodeJS, TypeScript, C++, .NET, Java, or SQL), or 9 years of related and applicable experience.
Strong analytical problem-solving skills, accuracy, and attention to detail; experience troubleshooting and developing creative technical solutions.
Demonstrated experience with software development lifecycle methodologies.
Ability to communicate with and coach or mentor team members while maintaining a positive, calm, approachable, respectful, and accountable manner.
Ability to connect the value of the Wellmark as a Service (WaaS) strategy to company strategy when making design and development decisions.
Ability to research and conduct root-cause analysis, define problems, recommend and implement solutions, verify results, and optimize solutions using data to support recommendations.
Ability to build relationships, gain support and acceptance, and communicate timely information appropriately to different stakeholder audiences.
Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment with changing priorities; strong organizational and time-management skills and ability to meet timeframes with little direction while maintaining data and information integrity.
Eagerness to learn, stay current on industry trends, and maintain a continuous-learning mindset.
Ability to collaborate as a team, earn trust and respect, actively listen, and apply coaching feedback.
Ability to lead, support, and work within a diverse development team model, including global staffing and crowdsourcing.
Demonstrated experience leading complex software solution design and delivery while remaining hands-on with coding, testing, deployment, troubleshooting, and production support.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience designing, building, deploying, and supporting generative AI applications, enterprise assistants, agents, agentic workflows, or reusable AI services in production 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 measure 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 using AWS services and infrastructure-as-code tools such as AWS CDK, Terraform, or CloudFormation.
Experience designing secure enterprise solutions incorporating authentication, authorization, workload identity, data protection, audit logging, policy enforcement, guardrails, and appropriate human oversight.
Experience building reusable frameworks, SDKs, libraries, templates, service contracts, test harnesses, or infrastructure components that accelerate delivery across multiple teams.
Experience implementing automated unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing, along with 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.
Strong problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills, with experience in an Agile product-delivery environment.
AWS certifications such as AWS Certified Developer, Solutions Architect, or Machine Learning Engineer.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and delivery of reusable enterprise assistants, agents, AI services, skills, and agentic workflows.
Design, engineer, deploy, troubleshoot, and support secure, scalable, and supportable AI solutions.
Partner with engineers, customers, product leaders, architecture, security, and governance stakeholders to translate business needs into production-ready solutions.
Establish enterprise blueprints and engineering standards for assistants, agents, agentic workflows, and AI evaluation.
Build reusable frameworks and components that reduce duplication and accelerate governed AI delivery across Wellmark.
Lead system development and engineering for highly complex programs, coordinating the preparation, coding, testing, and debugging of complex programs and workflows.
Serve as a subject matter expert in implementing innovative and cost-effective business solutions across multiple applications and systems.
Provide leadership, training, and guidance in root-cause analysis, problem definition, solution implementation, verification, and ongoing optimization.
Analyze defects to identify root causes and guide others in identifying improvement opportunities.
Mentor and support other technology areas in developing and implementing solutions, including use of new or enhanced software and applications.
Coordinate integration of products, processes, and complex solutions with company resources, 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 relevant industry and knowledge groups, and provide direction for enterprise standards.
Conduct code reviews and monitor adherence to standards.
Perform other duties as assigned.