Distinguished AI Engineer

About the role

The Distinguished AI Engineer is a senior technical expert who designs, builds, and scales enterprise AI solutions. This role is for a hands-on individual contributor who can influence architecture, delivery models, and engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy enterprise AI solutions spanning traditional machine learning, generative AI, and agentic AI systems.
• Architect and deliver scalable, resilient AI solutions leveraging technologies such as agentic systems, large language models (LLMs), distributed systems, and event-driven architectures.
• Build reusable AI services, frameworks, accelerators, and reference architectures leveraged across multiple teams and use cases.
• Partner with business domain SMEs, product, engineering, architecture, security, data, and business teams to translate business opportunities into scalable AI solutions.
• Make sound buy, build, and integrate decisions across commercial and open-source AI solutions, balancing speed, cost, risk, security, scalability, and strategic differentiation.
• Use modern AI-assisted development tooling to improve speed, quality, and efficiency of solution delivery.
• Guide implementation teams through architecture, design, model selection, evaluation, deployment, and operationalization of AI solutions.
• Mentor junior AI engineers and elevate the broader organization's AI engineering capabilities.
• Influence technical direction across teams through expertise, credibility, and collaboration rather than formal authority.
• Define enterprise-wide technical direction, including architecture patterns, integration standards, and reusable platform capabilities.
• Lead AI-driven modernization of legacy systems through automated code transformation, service decomposition, and continuous optimization.
• Design and implement AI-enabled software development lifecycle (SDLC) practices to improve engineering velocity and quality.
• Establish technical standards, governance frameworks, and best practices for AI systems, including monitoring, evaluation, and responsible AI.
• Partner with engineering teams and stakeholders to enable adoption of AI-assisted development and drive continuous improvement in system performance and productivity.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship while influencing enterprise technology decisions through deep expertise and hands-on engineering.

Requirements

• Requires a bachelor's degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field and a minimum of 15 years of experience in software engineering, including experience leading, designing, implementing, and operating distributed systems and large-scale architectures.
• Experience designing, developing, and maintaining software solutions using Python, Java, or comparable object-oriented programming languages, as well as experience designing and implementing APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures, and applying cloud, CI/CD, and DevOps practices.

Preferred Skills, Capabilities & Experiences

• Subject matter expert in machine learning, GenAI, and AI agents.
• Experience working in a Fortune 100 regulated company, startup, and or top-tier technology firm, ideally in combination.
• Proven success at building and deploying reusable AI services at scale.
• Experience operationalizing AI in production with MLOps, LLMOps, observability, and governance practices.

Benefits

This role offers a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase, and a 401(k) match. Additional benefits include medical, dental, vision, short and long term disability, life insurance, wellness programs, and financial education resources.

Pay

The salary range for this specific position is $231,440 - $416,592. Location(s): Illinois, California, Washington, Virginia, Massachusetts.

Schedule

Associates are required to work at an Elevance Health location at least once per week, and potentially several times per week.