Distinguished Engineer - Responsible AI

About the role

The Distinguished Engineer - Responsible AI leads the design, development, governance, and deployment of enterprise-scale AI systems with Responsible AI at the core. This role sets the technical strategy, architecture patterns, and engineering practices needed to build AI solutions that are scalable, secure, reliable, explainable, compliant, and aligned with enterprise Responsible AI principles.

Responsibilities

• Define enterprise-wide technical direction for Responsible AI engineering, including architecture patterns, integration standards, model risk controls, evaluation frameworks, guardrails, observability, and reusable platform capabilities.
• Partner with engineering, data science, legal, compliance, security, privacy, and risk teams to translate Responsible AI principles, regulatory expectations, and enterprise policies into practical technical controls.
• Develop reusable Responsible AI platform services, reference architectures, tooling, and implementation patterns to accelerate safe and consistent adoption of AI across the enterprise.
• Architect and deliver scalable, resilient AI solutions leveraging technologies such as agentic systems, large language models (LLMs), distributed systems, and event-driven architectures.
• Define and operationalize metrics for AI system quality, trustworthiness, safety, fairness, reliability, performance, and business impact.
• Lead AI-driven modernization of legacy systems through automated code transformation, service decomposition, and continuous optimization.
• Establish technical standards, governance frameworks, and best practices for AI systems, including monitoring, evaluation, and responsible AI.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship while influencing enterprise technology decisions through deep expertise and hands-on engineering.

Requirements

• Requires a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or related field and a minimum of 15 years of experience in software engineering, expertise in distributed systems and large-scale architecture, or any combination of education and experience, which would provide an equivalent background.
• Experience delivering production-grade AI/ML systems at scale, building agentic systems or complex LLM-based applications, modernizing large, complex legacy systems, and delivering high-quality systems also required.
• Strong programming expertise in Python, Java, or similar required.
• Experience with APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures, cloud platforms, and CI/CD and DevOps practices required.

Preferred Skills, Capabilities and Experiences

• Ability to translate policy, risk, compliance, legal, privacy, and security requirements into practical engineering patterns and platform capabilities.
• Experience implementing AI governance and control frameworks, including model evaluation, validation, documentation, monitoring, auditability, model risk management, and regulatory compliance.
• Demonstrated ability to influence senior technical and business stakeholders, establish enterprise standards, mentor engineering leaders, and drive adoption of modern Responsible AI practices.
• Hands-on experience with LLM evaluation, prompt safety, hallucination mitigation, content safety, toxicity detection, jailbreak resistance, red-teaming, guardrails, and AI observability.
• Strong programming expertise in Python, Java, or similar.
• Deep experience with APIs, microservices, and event-driven architectures, cloud platforms, and CI/CD and DevOps practices.

Benefits

Location: Chicago IL
In addition to your salary, Elevance Health offers benefits such as a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements).

Pay

The salary offered for this specific position is based on a number of legitimate, non-discriminatory factors set by the Company. The Company is fully committed to ensuring equal pay opportunities for equal work regardless of gender, race, or any other category protected by federal, state, and local pay equity laws.

Schedule

No amount is wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable under the terms and conditions of the applicable policies and plans. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company's sole discretion, consistent with the law.