Principal AI Engineer

About the role

By joining Sedgwick, you'll be part of something truly meaningful. It’s what our 33,000 colleagues do every day for people around the world who are facing the unexpected. We invite you to grow your career with us, experience our caring culture, and enjoy work-life balance. Here, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.

Newsweek Recognizes Sedgwick as America’s Greatest Workplaces National Top Companies

Certified as a Great Place to Work®

Fortune Best Workplaces in Financial Services & Insurance

Principal AI Engineer

Remote role open to all U.S. states.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Owns the technical outcome of a value-stream pod from problem shaping through production operation, including whether work contributes to shared capability or is incomplete.

Partners directly with business transformation leadership, examiners, nurse reviewers, and operations — sitting with users, shaping ambiguous problems, and refusing work that would wire new capability onto a process known to be broken.

Architects and personally builds production Generative AI agents, workflows, and applications, contributing code in Python and React rather than reviewing from a distance.

Sets and enforces engineering standards for the pod: API-first and contract-first delivery, AWS and Terraform as the path to production, GitHub Actions as the CI/CD bar, evaluation and observability as release gates, and human confirmation on consequential claims actions.

Accountable for whether the pod lands on shared substrate (context, documents, agents, assurance) or forks it; exercises stewardship and design-council authority to block duplicate builds.

Defines interface terms with vendor delivery teams when the stream is co-developed: shared repositories in Sedgwick accounts, Sedgwick-owned contracts, shared definition of done.

Establishes evaluation, provenance, and autonomy-ladder evidence for AI workflows — what may auto-complete, what must ask then do, and what is not ready — with the business owning thresholds.

Leads technical solution design and architectural review for the stream; escalates conflicts with enterprise standards (identity, model egress, PHI, portability) rather than absorbing them quietly.

Represents the pod on the AI Engineering design council; operates independently and is expected to converge with peer Principals without requiring SVP arbitration for ordinary technical disagreement.

Provides technical guidance and mentoring to Senior and Junior AI Engineers; raises the pod’s bar on code quality, operational excellence, and forward-deployed practice.

Leads complex troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and performance optimization for business-critical AI services and platforms.

Evaluates and recommends whether a capability should be built in-house, co-developed with a vendor, or not built — with a named owner and a removal path when a compromise is accepted.

ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES·

Performs other duties as assigned.

Travel as required, including regular on-site work with claims or Managed Care operations and with vendor delivery teams.

QUALIFICATIONS

Education & Licensing

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative discipline from an accredited college or university required. Master’s degree preferred.

Experience

Ten (10)+ or more years of software engineering experience, including at least four (4) years owning production Generative AI or applied-AI systems in the field — agents, workflows, or applications, including evaluation, failure handling, and a human review loop — or an equivalent combination of education and experience.Hands-on production experience on AWS, and hands-on Python, React, GitHub Actions, and Terraform, at a level sufficient to set the bar for a pod, not only meet it. Cloud certification or architecture-only experience without recent production code is not sufficient.Experience leading technical delivery for a value stream or equivalent without people-management authority.Experience in insurance, claims, healthcare, or another heavily regulated operational domain preferred.

Skills & Knowledge

Expert full-stack engineering skills in Python and React, with strong SQL, APIs, and service design; still writes production code

Deep, hands-on AWS, Terraform, and GitHub Actions — including identity, networking, environments, and operational recovery — sufficient to set standards and review others’ work

Production command of Generative AI agents, workflows, and applications, including tool use, orchestration, evaluation, provenance, and human-in-the-loop patterns

Ability to walk into a design session with examiners or operations leaders and leave with a shaped problem, scoped build, and explicit non-goals

Ability to keep a pod on shared substrate and to stop a duplicate build without escalating every conflict

Ability to set interface terms with vendors and internal platform teams while remaining a peer IC, not a manager of either

Strong mentoring, collaboration, and technical communication skills with the ability to influence transformation leadership, architecture, security, and engineering peers

Experience with machine learning, model fine-tuning, and/or graph databases (e.g. Neo4j) preferred

Experience with PydanticAI (or equivalent agent framework), agent observability, and AI Ops / LLMOps a plus

Ability to meet or exceed Performance Competencies

WORK ENVIRONMENT

When applicable and appropriate, consideration will be given to reasonable accommodation.

Mental: Clear and conceptual thinking ability; excellent judgment, troubleshooting, problem solving, analysis, and discretion; ability to handle work-related stress; ability to handle multiple priorities simultaneously; and ability to meet deadlines

Physical: Computer keyboarding, travel as required

Auditory/Visual: Hearing, vision and talking

Sedgwick is an Equal Opportunity Employer and a Drug-Free Workplace.

If you're excited about this role but your experience doesn't align perfectly with every qualification in the job description, consider applying for it anyway! Sedgwick is building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace and recognizes that each person possesses a unique combination of skills, knowledge, and experience. You may be just the right candidate for this or other roles.