Vice President, AI Engineering

Alight•Deerfield, IL

21h•$265,000 - $290,000•Remote

About The Position

Alight is seeking a Vice President of Artificial Intelligence to lead how we build, deploy, and scale AI across our products, services, and operations, and to use agentic AI to transform how people understand and act on their benefits. The first generation of AI capabilities is already in production. This leader inherits that foundation and is accountable for its next phase, scaling it into a coherent capability across the company. The opportunity is grounded in a combination few companies hold: Deep domain expertise in health, wealth, and benefits administration; Rich data on the moments that matter to participants; Operational workflows where intelligent automation can change outcomes; An established enterprise where trust, privacy, and responsible AI are essential. The role reports to the senior executive leading Alight's data, AI, and transformation agenda, with direct access to executive leadership and partnership across product, technology, operations, commercial, risk, and compliance. It carries the visibility, sponsorship, and accountability of a true enterprise leadership role.

Requirements

Proven technology and AI leader who has built real systems, led significant organizations, and operated with accountability for business outcomes.
Background may be multidisciplinary, with a focus on what has been built, the scale at which it operated, and the decisions personally owned.
Led a multi-team AI, machine learning, software, or platform organization through other senior leaders.
Deployed AI or complex technology products into production for a large user population, with measurable value.
Current fluency in generative AI, large language models, agentic systems, retrieval, evaluation, and production AI engineering.
Built shared platforms or foundational capabilities that multiple product and engineering teams depend on.
Owned a meaningful investment portfolio or budget, and made clear build, buy, and partner decisions without becoming captive to any single vendor.
Operated in a regulated, high-trust environment, with a practical command of AI risk, privacy, security, and lifecycle governance.
Recruited and developed senior technical leaders, and communicated with equal ease across engineers, clients, and executives.
Technical depth is essential. Ability to challenge an architecture, probe an evaluation approach, and tell a production-ready system from one that only looks it.

Responsibilities

Set the AI direction: Define a clear and differentiated AI strategy rooted in the problems Alight is uniquely positioned to solve, and translate it into a focused portfolio.
Make explicit choices about where Alight builds, partners, buys, and stops investing.
Concentrate investment where it delivers the most value, governing for cost per outcome as the platform matures.
Mature the reference architecture into the operating standard, so speed, reuse, and compliance are inherited by default.
Shape an operating model that balances enterprise standards with speed and ownership.
Scale the AI platform: Lead the reusable platform that lets teams build and operate AI securely, reliably, and repeatedly. The point is impact, not infrastructure for its own sake, so each new capability is faster, safer, and less expensive to deliver than the one before.
Agentic foundations, orchestration, retrieval and knowledge access, and model selection.
Evaluation, observability, and integration with enterprise data and services.
The AI Development Lifecycle (AIDLC), the paved path that builds in standards, tests, and security from the start, taking project setup from days to minutes and passing quality gates on the first pull request.
Transform the benefits experience: Lead the delivery of agentic, AI-powered experiences that reimagine how participants understand and act on their benefits, and set a high bar for usefulness, simplicity, accuracy, and trust.
Move from answering questions to taking action on a participant's behalf, with the right human oversight.
Own the full outcome, from shipping through adoption, reliability, and experience.
Hold teams to measurable value in production, at enterprise-grade reliability.
Reimagine work through intelligent automation: Find and scale the opportunities where AI removes friction, augments human judgment, and transforms complex operational processes.
Advance automation from rules-based, to AI-assisted, to agentic.
Move beyond scripts and isolated tools toward adaptive workflows that connect knowledge, decisions, and action.
Industrialize automation at volume while preserving appropriate human oversight.
Make trust a product capability: Build responsible AI into how solutions are designed, evaluated, released, monitored, and improved. Partner with risk, security, privacy, legal, and compliance leaders to create controls rigorous enough for a high-trust environment and practical enough to support speed. At Alight, governance operates as an enablement function that weighs risk alongside platform, architecture, cost, and strategy, rather than as a separate compliance exercise.
Build the organization: Recruit, develop, and lead a world-class AI organization spanning platform engineering, applied AI, product delivery, intelligent automation, quality and evaluation, and responsible AI. Create an environment where strong leaders have real ownership, exceptional technical talent does the best work of their careers, and teams are measured by outcomes.
Represent Alight's AI ambition: Serve as a credible and compelling voice on AI with clients, partners, executive leaders, and the broader market. Listen closely to the problems clients are working to solve, translate those needs into strategic choices, and explain Alight's direction with clarity and substance.