Senior AI Engineer

Athene • West Des Moines, IA

2d

About The Position

We are driven to do more. More for our customers and the financial professionals who offer our products. If you are driven to do more and love the challenge of pursuing more, Athene is your kind of company. You will find we offer more than the basics to create an inclusive and dynamic work environment at our various locations. Purpose: Athene is accelerating its AI initiatives to transform how we serve customers, agents, and business partners. As a leader in insurance and annuities, we are committed to applying Generative AI, Agentic AI, and Machine Learning to deliver operational excellence and innovative products. We’re seeking a Senior AI Engineer to help scale next-generation AI capabilities across sales, marketing, finance, risk management, product development, claims, and enterprise productivity. You’ll join a small, cross-functional team building AI-native solutions from the ground up—rapidly prototyping, experimenting with new capabilities, and moving fast from concept to production. This is a high-impact, leadership-oriented role where you’ll design advanced AI systems, mentor junior engineers, and shape the technical direction of Athene’s AI platform.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience), with 6+ years of experience in software engineering or data science, including 2+ years working with GenAI, LLMs, or agentic AI.
• Proficiency in Python, REST APIs, React/Node.js, and tools like OpenAPI, JSON, and YAML.
• Hands-on experience with AWS AI services (Bedrock, SageMaker, Nova, Textract, Translate, Lambda, Step Functions).
• Strong understanding of LLMs, embeddings, prompt engineering, and tool use.
• Comfortable with CI/CD pipelines, Docker, and cloud-native infrastructure.
• Solid foundation in software engineering, backend performance, observability, and security.
• Experience with enterprise-grade AI tools like Claude, GPT-4/4o, and ChatGPT Enterprise.
• Product-oriented mindset: rapidly prototype, iterate, test and deliver business-facing AI features.
• Track record of mentorship and technical leadership in AI-focused teams.
• Drive. Discipline. Confidence. Focus. Commitment.

Nice To Haves

• Insurance or financial services experience, plus knowledge of regulatory and compliance requirements (preferred).

Responsibilities

• Build, deploy, and optimize production-grade AI applications leveraging GenAI, Agentic AI, and ML.
• Lead design and scaling of RAG pipelines, vector search systems, and LLM evaluation workflows.
• Develop AI agents with LangChain, AutoGen, LlamaIndex, or LangGraph for task automation and decision support.
• Translate complex business problems into end-to-end AI solutions using AWS-native services.
• Ingest and process unstructured/structured data (parsing, chunking, embeddings, retrieval).
• Deliver intuitive user experiences integrating LLMs and intelligent agents into real-time workflows.
• Integrate and evaluate enterprise AI tools such as Claude, GPT-4/4o, ChatGPT Enterprise, Copilot, Glean, Shelf, and Genesys AI.
• Drive innovation in document automation (summarization, translation, NER) and multilingual NLP.
• Implement observability, governance, and responsible AI practices for secure, compliant deployments.
• Collaborate across IT, data, legal, compliance, and business teams on high-impact solutions.
• Mentor engineers and lead specific workstreams to advance Athene’s AI platform.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees