Lead AI Engineer

Medica is a nonprofit health plan with more than a million members that serves communities in Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Missouri, and beyond. We deliver personalized health care experiences and partner closely with providers to ensure members are genuinely cared for.

We're a team that owns our work with accountability, makes data-driven decisions, embraces continuous learning, and celebrates collaboration - because success is a team sport. It's our mission to be there in the moments that matter most for our members and employees. Join us in creating a community of connected care, where coordinated, quality service is the norm and every member feels valued.

Medica is seeking a hands-on, execution focused Lead AI Platform Engineer to spearhead the development and scaling of our next-generation AI agents and infrastructure. You'll lead complex projects that power AI-driven healthcare solutions for our members, providers, and employees, enhancing the healthcare experience end-to-end. This role is ideal for leaders who thrive on ownership, excel in solving technical and business problems, and are at the forefront of software innovation. Performs other duties as assigned.

Key Accountabilities

• End-To-End AI Platform Development: Lead the design, implementation, and deployment of AI pipelines, systems, and platforms - from evaluation design and benchmarking through product integration - ensuring performance, reliability, and end-to-end safety and transparency
• Drive AI Native Use Cases: Lead the prototyping, building, and operation of cutting-edge product and consumer-facing AI systems, pushing the state-of-the-art to solve our core healthcare and technical challenges
• Technical Leadership: Lead technical decision-making and architectural discussions for AI and data platforms. Uphold high engineering standards and share best practices in code review and design discussions
• Continuous Learning: Stay up to date with the latest research and developments in AI. Evaluate new approaches or tools and drive their adoption to advance our capabilities. Lead efforts to evangelize these advancements within the organization

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in related field
• 5 years of experience beyond degree building production grade software with Python, Go, or equivalent, ideally as the responsible technical leader

Preferred Qualifications

• Demonstrated expertise in agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, OpenAI ADK)-and the ability to explain when and why to use them (or when/why not to)
• Experience building and running AI native workflows such as orchestrator-workers, evaluator-optimizer, and prompt chaining
• Experience building evaluations for AI systems-for accuracy, bias, security, function calling accuracy, etc
• Abiltiy to justify decisions between RAG, prompt engineering, and fine-tuning
• Experience with modular agent architectures where specialized agents communicate
• Have a stance on when to leverage generative AI-and when not to
• Have worked with healthcare data, HIPAA compliance, or in regulated environments
• Love (or hate) Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot
• Have a favorite MCP server (or 3)

Skills and Abilities

• Proven ability to lead initiatives across a team to create, manage and scale public cloud infrastructure in AWS/Azure/GCP
• Experience deploying infrastructure via Terraform or another declarative tool
• Familiarity with containerization & orchestration including Docker, K8s, Helm
• Modern DevOps tooling including Github Actions, Prometheus + Grafana, Open Telemetry

This position is an Office role, which requires an employee to work onsite, on average, 3 days per week. We are open to candidates located near one of the following office locations: Minnetonka, MN, or Madison, WI.

The full salary grade for this position is $127,800 - $219,100 . While the full salary grade is provided, the typical hiring salary range for this role is expected to be between $127,800 - $173,470. Annual salary range placement will depend on a variety of factors including, but not limited to, education, work experience, applicable certifications and/or licensure, the position's scope and responsibility, internal pay equity and external market salary data. In addition to base compensation, this position may be eligible for incentive plan compensation in addition to base salary. Medica offers a generous total rewards package that includes competitive medical, dental, vision, PTO, Holidays, paid volunteer time off, 401K contributions, caregiver services and many other benefits to support our employees.

The compensation and benefits information is provided as of the date of this posting. Medica's compensation and benefits are subject to change at any time, with or without notice, subject to applicable law.

Eligibility to work in the US: Medica does not offer work visa sponsorship for this role. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of application. Employment is contingent on verification of identity and eligibility to work in the United States.

We are an Equal Opportunity employer, where all qualified candidates receive consideration for employment indiscriminate of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic.