Principal AI Engineer

Humana•Louisville, NY

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Humana is looking for an AI Engineering Principal to serve as a senior technical leader within the Simplification Center of Excellence (CoE), driving the architecture, technology strategy, and delivery of enterprise-scale simplification capabilities. This role partners with senior executives and cross-functional teams to design secure, scalable solutions that enable workflow understanding, rapid prototyping, and high-impact service improvements across the organization. The Principal Engineer will translate complex business needs into clear technical roadmaps, establish engineering standards, and guide platform and integration decisions, while mentoring teams and fostering best practices. This leader ensures that simplification initiatives are built on durable, adaptable architectures that accelerate innovation, improve experiences, and support long-term enterprise success. The Simplification Center of Excellence (CoE) is building a new enterprise capability that helps teams create simpler, more effective, and more human‑centered solutions for associates, members, patients, and providers. Joining this team means contributing directly to how the organization understands work today and builds better experiences for the future. The CoE develops shared tools, methods, and guidance that support teams from discovery through delivery—bringing together process insight, research, ideation, rapid prototyping, and impact assessment to improve both speed and quality of outcomes. By establishing these capabilities, the team enables more informed decisions, stronger solution design, and greater confidence in what gets built and delivered. This work involves designing and building the foundational systems that enable these capabilities—translating complex workflows and insights into scalable, reliable, and well‑architected solutions. Engineers on the team work closely with product, design, and research partners to prototype, test, and harden new approaches, while helping define technical standards, data flows, and extensible patterns that can be reused across the enterprise. We are seeking an AI Engineering Principal to serve as a senior technical leader within the Simplification Center of Excellence (CoE), owning the technical architecture, technology strategy, and implementation of the CoE's core simplification and acceleration capabilities. In this role, you will act as a trusted technical advisor to senior executives, helping shape and drive enterprise‑wide service simplification initiatives that improve how work is designed, delivered, and experienced across the organization. As a Principal Engineer, you will lead the design and evolution of scalable, secure, and extensible systems that enable discovery, workflow understanding, rapid prototyping, and solution validation. You will partner closely with product, experience, data, and engineering teams to translate complex business and operational needs into clear technical architectures, design patterns, and implementation roadmaps. Your work will ensure that simplification capabilities are reliable, and able to support high‑impact use cases across multiple teams and domains. In this role, you will collaborate directly with senior leaders to align technical strategy with enterprise priorities, providing guidance on tradeoffs, sequencing, and long‑term sustainability. You will set technical standards for the CoE, influence platform and integration decisions, and help establish best practices for building and scaling shared capabilities across the enterprise. As a senior technical leader and mentor, you will provide hands‑on leadership and coaching to engineers on the team, fostering strong engineering practices, thoughtful design, and high‑quality delivery. Through your leadership, you will help raise the technical bar of the organization while enabling faster, clearer execution—ensuring that simplification initiatives are grounded in sound architecture and built to endure.

Requirements

10+ years software engineering experience; 3+ years in architecture/lead roles.
Strong leadership, communication, and collaboration skills in a cross-functional product team.
2 or more years of experience leading people or projects.
Demonstrated ability to work across product, engineering, operations, and delivery teams to align needs, opportunities, and solutions.
Experience supporting or accelerating product development processes.

Nice To Haves

Enterprise security/compliance knowledge
DevOps knowledge such as containerization and infrastructure as code
Data engineering knowledge/experience such as ETL and data pipelines
Human-centered design
Interest or desire for pair-programming
Understanding of training and deploying machine learning models

Responsibilities

Advise and make recommendations to senior IT and business leaders on areas for service simplification.
Define and maintain system architecture and technology stack.
Collaborate with product managers, designers, business intelligence engineers, and other stakeholders to make technical decisions, define technical requirements, and create development roadmaps in service of business goals.
Conduct code reviews, provide constructive feedback, and promote continuous improvement in code quality and development processes.
Mentor engineers and enforce best practices.
Contribute hands-on across the stack.
Collaborate with DevOps for CI/CD and cloud deployments.
Participate in hiring and onboarding new team members.