The job profile for this position is IT Principal, which is a Band 5 Senior Contributor Career Track Role.

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This position within the AI Center of Enablement represents the apex of technical leadership for AI engineering across The Cigna Group, defining the future of AI engineering capabilities and making critical technical decisions with multi-year impact. The AI Engineering Principal serves as the organization's foremost authority on AI platform engineering, combining unparalleled technical depth with strategic vision, organizational influence, and the ability to drive transformational change in how the enterprise builds and deploys AI systems. This role establishes multi-year technical strategy for AI platform evolution, architects foundational platforms enabling hundreds of use cases, drives adoption of emerging AI paradigms across the enterprise, and shapes technical standards that influence hundreds of engineers and thousands of AI applications.

This position is the top technical authority for AI engineering at The Cigna Group. As an AI Engineering Principal, you will define the future of AI capabilities, make multi-year architectural decisions, and align technical strategy with business goals. You will design enterprise AI infrastructure, set organizational standards, lead modernization initiatives, and bring cutting-edge AI research into production ahead of industry adoption.

Key Responsibilities

• Define long-term AI platform strategy and anticipate technology shifts.

• Make foundational architectural decisions shaping enterprise AI for years.

• Champion strategic investments for sustainable healthcare AI advantage.

• Establish technical principles and reference architectures as organizational standards.

• Architect and implement enterprise AI platforms on AWS balancing speed, security, HIPAA compliance, and cost.

• Create frameworks that simplify complexity and accelerate AI development.

• Build advanced RAG systems with graph databases, vector stores, and intelligent retrieval.

• Develop agent frameworks for planning, tool use, and multi-agent collaboration.

• Implement techniques like model distillation, fine-tuning, synthetic data generation, and evaluation pipelines.

• Deliver observability platforms for model performance and cost tracking.

• Build security and compliance frameworks addressing prompt injection, data leakage, adversarial attacks, and HIPAA.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent experience).

• 12+ years in software engineering, 6+ years building production AI/ML systems at scale.

• Expert in Python and AI frameworks; recognized contributions to open source or standards.

• Proven experience architecting AI platforms serving thousands of users or millions of requests.

• Deep knowledge of LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Llama) and model architectures.

• Mastery of orchestration frameworks (Langchain, Pydantic-AI, LangGraph).

• Advanced expertise in RAG architectures and query optimization.

• Expert-level AWS knowledge including Bedrock, SageMaker, and cost optimization.

If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10Mbps download/5Mbps upload.

For this position, we anticipate offering an annual salary of 149,000 - 248,300 USD / yearly, depending on relevant factors, including experience and geographic location.

This role is also anticipated to be eligible to participate in an annual bonus plan and long term incentive plan.

At The Cigna Group, you’ll enjoy a comprehensive range of benefits, with a focus on supporting your whole health. Starting on day one of your employment, you’ll be offered several health-related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well-being and behavioral health programs. We also offer 401(k), company paid life insurance, tuition reimbursement, a minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year and paid holidays. For more details on our employee benefits programs, click here.

Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions including but not limited to lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital or familial status, genetic information, status with regard to public assistance, citizenship status or any other characteristic protected by applicable equal employment opportunity laws.

Please note that you must meet our posting guidelines to be eligible for consideration.  Policy can be reviewed at this link.

Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances.