Vice President, AI Innovation & Partnerships

Centene Corporation•Remote-MO, MO

1d•$207,000 - $392,100

About The Position

Leads Centene's AI innovation and strategic technology partnerships function, providing enterprise technical leadership for high-value AI use cases and shaping vendor platforms to meet Centene's needs. Works with business, data, engineering, security, and governance leaders to turn complex opportunities into technical strategies, reference architectures, prototypes, and scaled solutions combining Centene data and context with foundation models, agents, tools, and vendor platforms. Serves as a senior technical counterpart to business partners and strategic vendors, influencing roadmaps and joint development priorities while ensuring vendor platforms are interoperable, extensible, observable, and aligned with Centene's AI control plane and enterprise architecture. Advises executive leadership on AI capabilities, technical tradeoffs, partnerships, and build, buy, partner, or co-development decisions. Sets the enterprise agenda for data context and AI innovation, focusing on use cases that can improve member outcomes, operating performance, or medical cost management. Leads multidisciplinary teams through discovery, prototyping, technical validation, and production architecture, balancing speed with security, reliability, governance, and maintainability. Owns the technical strategy for vendor AI platforms and partnerships, evaluates vendor capabilities, and promotes open, composable, and portable patterns. Partners across Procurement, Legal, Security, Enterprise Architecture, and AI Governance to support interoperability, responsible AI, data protection, auditability, and intellectual property safeguards. Defines how priority AI solutions use Centene's AI control plane, agentic framework, AI Gateway, enterprise context layer, trusted data products, and engineering platforms. Establishes technical quality standards and works with platform and engineering leaders to turn gaps into roadmap priorities. Ensures innovations become durable products with clear ownership, support, adoption, performance, and value tracking. Advises senior leaders on AI trends and investment priorities and represents Centene in strategic technology partnerships and external forums. Performs other duties as assigned and complies with all policies and standards.

Requirements

Bachelor's degree and 12+ years of related experience, including significant leadership experience in artificial intelligence, machine learning, enterprise architecture, technology strategy, product innovation, software engineering, cloud platforms, data and analytics, or a related discipline; or equivalent experience demonstrating applicable knowledge, duties, scope, and skill.
10+ years of experience leading enterprise technology initiatives, AI/ML solutions, software engineering, cloud platforms, data and analytics, enterprise architecture, or technology strategy, including executive-level leadership responsibilities.

Nice To Haves

Demonstrated experience translating complex business opportunities into scalable technical solutions through AI, automation, advanced analytics, and emerging technologies.
Experience in healthcare, managed care, or another highly regulated industry, including implementation of secure, compliant, and scalable AI solutions.

Responsibilities

Set the enterprise agenda for data context and AI innovation, directing resources toward high-value use cases.
Partner with executive business and technology leaders to frame problems, assess AI suitability, and define technical hypotheses, workflows, and measurable outcomes.
Lead multidisciplinary teams through discovery, rapid prototyping, technical validation, and production architecture.
Own the technical strategy for vendor AI harnesses and define their integration with Centene data, context, identity, security, model, and observability services.
Shape strategic AI vendors' joint roadmaps, co-development priorities, platform extensions, and commitments.
Evaluate emerging vendor capabilities through technical diligence, architecture reviews, prototypes, and competitive testing; recommend whether Centene should build, buy, partner, or co-develop.
Drive vendor platforms toward open, composable, and portable patterns, including support for multiple models, reusable agents and tools, enterprise context, standard protocols and APIs, evaluation, tracing, cost attribution, and lifecycle controls.
Partner with Procurement, Legal, Security, Enterprise Architecture, and AI Governance on strategic agreements addressing interoperability, responsible AI, data protection, auditability, roadmap influence, and intellectual property protection.
Define how priority AI solutions use Centene's AI control plane, agentic framework, AI Gateway, enterprise context layer, trusted data products, and engineering platforms.
Establish technical quality standards for prototypes and production solutions, including evaluation, testing, security, reliability, observability, model and prompt change management, and operational ownership.
Work with platform and engineering leaders to identify gaps and convert them into platform roadmap priorities.
Ensure innovation efforts transition into durable products with clear ownership, support models, adoption plans, performance measures, and value tracking.
Monitor the external AI market and run focused experiments to assess whether emerging technologies are ready for enterprise use.
Advise senior leadership on AI trends, architecture choices, vendor dependencies, investment priorities, and changing model and platform capabilities.
Represent Centene in strategic technology partnerships and external forums, maintaining relationships and bringing relevant learning back into the enterprise.
Perform other duties as assigned and comply with all policies and standards.