Principal Architect - Artificial Intelligence

Wellmark•Des Moines, IA

About The Position

We’re seeking a Principal Architect to help define our next-generation AI capabilities across risk management, product development, claims, and enterprise productivity. You’ll join a small, cross-functional team exploring AI-native solutions by rapidly prototyping, experimenting with new capabilities, and moving fast from concept to production.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree or direct and applicable work experience.
Minimum 9 years of experience of which could be any combination of the following: Security application experience including program controls, processes, security tools such as encryption at rest, encryption in transit, etc.
Minimum 4 years of cloud architecture experience, including system integration, application development and system analysis.
Expert knowledge of network protocols and enterprise network architecture and the ability to research, architect and drive complete technical solutions, consisting of multiple technologies.
Experience securing workloads.
Experience migrating to the public cloud (Amazon, Google, Microsoft).
Experience managing cloud access security brokers (CASB), including single sign on, authorization, encryption, etc.
Experience with SQL and NoSQL database systems.
Demonstrated ability to be a self-starter who can lead others and focuses on results and desired outcomes and how best to achieve them.
Flexible and adaptable to change.
Experience managing and understanding stakeholder issues, providing clear and concise communication and counseling to stakeholders.
Change agent with the proven ability to influence others by using appropriate skills to guide individuals or groups to accomplish work, reach consensus or take action.
Experience using strong business knowledge and perspective, synthesize complex information and develop theories to arrive at logical recommendations.
Adept at viewing situations from the stakeholder’s perspective to better address their needs and expectations.
Ability to maintain effectiveness when experiencing major changes in work tasks or the work environment; adjusts effectively to work within new work structures, business processes, work requirements, or cultures.
Ability to coach and mentor others. Provides guidance and feedback to help an employee or groups of employees strengthen their knowledge and skills to accomplish a task or solve a problem, which in turn should improve job performance.
Travel required up to 5%.

Nice To Haves

Hands-on experience with AWS AI services (Bedrock, etc.).
Strong knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, prompt engineering, and tool use.
Proven ability to prototype, iterate, and scale AI-enabled features.
Familiarity with compliance/regulatory needs in insurance or financial services (preferred).
3+ years working with Machine Learning (ML)/Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), model serving, and improving model quality.
Experience with GenAI/LLM techniques and tooling (prompt engineering, retrieval/vector stores, agents/tool use, content safety/guardrails, offline/online eval frameworks, vibe coding).
3+ years in AI Architecture.

Responsibilities

Elevate Artificial Intelligence practices across engineering at Wellmark.
Design and scale RAG pipelines, vector search systems, and LLM evaluation workflows.
Create AI agents with frameworks such as LangChain, AutoGen, or Strands.
Ingest and process unstructured/structured data (parsing, chunking, embeddings, retrieval).
Develop intuitive user experiences powered by LLMs and AI agents for real-time workflows.
Integrate enterprise AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT Enterprise, Copilot, and Nova.
Implement observability, governance, and intentional AI practices in compliance with regulations.
Lead and support the management of efforts for highly integrated and complex application, cloud, and system platforms. Responsible for system performance/availability and ensuring solutions developed adhere and align to the architecture standards. Proactively oversees the fulfillment of service level agreements and ensures solutions remain current with industry best practices, technologies and within Wellmark’s standards.
Effectively manage and influence the design and implementation of technology solutions, to systematically address security issues and develop secure coding practices. Develop security patterns and Enterprise Control Frameworks, assists in complex integrations and works cross-functionally with business and Platform Engineer, Solution Architects and other Technology stakeholders in technical planning and security system delivery.
Take a leadership role in managing the partnerships with Technology stakeholders; including but not limited to Lead Architect, Platform Engineer, and other Cloud Service engineers to provide insight/ direction regarding security process improvements.
Provide mitigation strategies that support applications, cloud, or systems from infrastructure, architecture, and secure coding.
Mentor other Architects with projects, security engineers on engineering tasks, consult with upper management on security risks and Technology policies and develop security architecture standards. Mentor other Security Architects and Engineers with design, project security requirements, and work involving other stakeholders. Mentor Security and Cloud Engineers on solutions and other technical issues.
Oversee, review, and provide technical leadership on the design efforts of Wellmark’s supported solutions; including but not limited to the evaluation of vendors during the selection process, integrating with new vendors, design, implementation, and administration.
Adhere to and is accountable for the support and influence of Wellmark’s architecture governance standards and technical standards, including SDLC. Provide design specifications to governing boards for proper approvals. Provide expert guidance regarding Technology policies, security, and infrastructure. Proactively work with team members to address security and compliance issues.
Maintain and ensure strong relationships and business acumen with the business to ensure technical designs are aligned with business needs. Provide exceptional customer service and solutions.
Assist in Architecture roadmap and Artifact development.
Other duties as assigned.