Principal Architect - Artificial Intelligence
Explicitly requires vibe coding skills and experience with GenAI/LLM tooling; focuses on rapid prototyping, agents, RAG, and modern AI dev practices.
About the Role
Principal Architect - Artificial Intelligence to define and scale Wellmark's next-generation AI capabilities across risk management, product, claims, and enterprise productivity. Lead rapid prototyping and production of RAG pipelines, vector search, LLM-powered experiences and AI agents while implementing observability, governance, security, and cloud architecture practices.
Job Description
Role
The Principal Architect - Artificial Intelligence will define and lead next-generation AI capabilities across risk management, product development, claims, and enterprise productivity. You will join a small cross-functional team to rapidly prototype, iterate, and move AI concepts into production, while ensuring secure, compliant, and observable AI solutions.
Key Responsibilities
- Elevate AI practices across engineering and architecture teams.
- Design and scale RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines, vector search systems, and LLM evaluation workflows.
- Create and deploy AI agents using frameworks such as LangChain, AutoGen, or Strands.
- Ingest and process structured and unstructured data (parsing, chunking, embeddings, retrieval).
- Develop LLM-powered user experiences and real-time workflows.
- Integrate enterprise AI tools (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT Enterprise, Copilot, Nova).
- Implement observability, governance, security, and compliance practices for AI systems.
- Migrate and secure workloads in public cloud environments and manage cloud security controls.
- Mentor architects, security engineers, and other stakeholders; influence technical and security design decisions.
Qualifications
Required
- Bachelor’s degree or equivalent applicable work experience.
- Minimum 9 years of relevant experience, including security application experience and program controls (encryption at rest/in transit, secure coding practices).
- Minimum 4 years of cloud architecture experience including system integration, application development, and system analysis.
- Expert knowledge of network protocols and enterprise network architecture.
- Experience securing workloads and migrating to public cloud providers (Amazon, Google, Microsoft).
- Experience managing cloud access security brokers (CASB), single sign-on, authorization, and encryption.
- Experience with SQL and NoSQL database systems.
- Demonstrated leadership, stakeholder management, communication, change leadership, and coaching/mentoring skills.
- Ability to maintain effectiveness during major changes and work across new processes and structures.
- Travel required up to 5%.
Preferred
- Hands-on experience with AWS AI services (Bedrock, etc.).
- Strong knowledge of LLMs, embeddings, prompt engineering, and tool use.
- Proven ability to prototype, iterate, and scale AI-enabled features.
- Familiarity with compliance/regulatory requirements in insurance or financial services.
- 3+ years working with ML/AI systems, RAG, model serving, and model quality improvement.
- Experience with GenAI/LLM techniques and tooling (prompt engineering, retrieval/vector stores, agents/tool use, content safety/guardrails, evaluation frameworks, vibe coding).
Additional Responsibilities
- Lead management of complex application, cloud, and system platforms; ensure performance, availability, and adherence to architecture standards.
- Influence and implement security processes, secure coding, enterprise control frameworks, and cross-functional integrations.
- Manage partnerships with technology stakeholders and provide guidance on security process improvements.
- Provide mitigation strategies for applications and cloud/infrastructure security and contribute to architecture roadmap and artifacts.
- Oversee vendor evaluation and integration, and ensure solutions align with business needs.