Principal AI Engineer

Humana • Washington, DC

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The Principal AI Engineer acts as Humana’s senior technical authority for agentic AI platforms, overseeing strategy, architecture, and engineering execution. This role ensures the development and operation of secure, scalable, and innovative AI infrastructure, tools, and services that empower teams to build and deploy autonomous agent-driven applications. By collaborating across engineering, data science, and operations, the Principal AI Engineer advances enterprise AI capabilities, sets technical standards, and delivers production-ready solutions aligned with Humana’s long-term technology vision.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field.
• 10+ years of professional software or platform engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in Python, including building production services and shared libraries used by others.
• Hands-on experience with modern AI systems, including LLM integration, RAG, embeddings, and applied generative AI patterns.
• Strong background in machine learning engineering, including model deployment, monitoring, evaluation, and lifecycle management.
• Expert-level understanding of FastAPI, Flask, or similar frameworks, and REST/gRPC service design.
• Strong proficiency with cloud-native development on AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Minimum 5 years of containerization and orchestration experience (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Production experience with CI/CD pipelines, version control, and modern DevOps practices.
• Demonstrated ability to own large, ambiguous problems and deliver high-value, high-quality solutions.

Nice To Haves

• Experience shaping engineering culture or influencing architectural direction across teams.
• Experience with generative AI tooling (e.g., LangChain, LlamaIndex, PydanticAI, or similar).
• Strong understanding of deep learning frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Experience with distributed systems (Akka, Flink, or similar).
• Prior work building platforms rather than one-off applications.
• A track record of pragmatic decision-making, balancing innovation with maintainability and long-term value.

Responsibilities

• Lead enterprise architecture, design, and engineering for agentic AI platforms, ensuring secure, scalable, and reliable infrastructure.
• Build and maintain developer tools, CI/CD pipelines, and automation for efficient agentic AI application development and deployment.
• Architect and manage cloud-based AI services (GCP preferred), including Kubernetes, security controls, and observability systems.
• Develop robust backend APIs and services in Python to support agentic AI platform functionality and data management.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams, set engineering standards, mentor peers, and drive innovation aligned with Humana’s AI technology roadmap.

Benefits

• Humana provides medical, dental and vision benefits, 401(k) retirement savings plan, time off (including paid time off, company and personal holidays, volunteer time off, paid parental and caregiver leave), short-term and long-term disability, life insurance and many other opportunities.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal