AI Engineering Leader

$200000 - $300000 Total Compensation

About the Role

Vertafores AI organization is moving fast from agentic workflows to intelligent document processing and predictive analytics. These systems are in production serving thousands of agencies and carriers across North America and the bar for reliability scalability and craft is high.

Were looking for an AI Engineering Leader who leads from the front. Youll own delivery for one of our core AI product domains managing a small team of engineers while staying close enough to the work that youre the person your team turns to when the architecture gets hard. Youll be a hands on leader with expertise in designing evaluating and shipping AI based features.

This is not a role for someone who has stepped fully away from the code. You are an active participant in the team reviewing PRs making technical decisions and writing code. Your value multiplier is the team you build and enable but your credibility comes from the depth you bring.

What Youll Do

Lead a High-Performing AI Engineering Team

• Manage mentor and grow a team of 48 engineers. Running 1:1s setting technical direction and creating clear paths for individual development
• Foster a culture of rigor fast iteration and creative problem solving. Build a team where engineers are empowered to raise problems early and move from experiment to production without unnecessary friction
• Partner with recruiting to hire strong AI engineering talent and retain it through meaningful work and clear growth

Own Technical Delivery for Your Domain

• Drive the end-to-end delivery of AI features and systems within your teams scope from design to deployment to post-production observability
• Be the accountable technical voice for your domain: scope estimates architectural decisions tradeoff documentation and post-mortems all run through you
• Work closely with a product manager to translate customer problems and business priorities into a well-sequenced engineering roadmap

Stay Hands-On at the Right Level

• Contribute meaningfully to system design code reviews and debugging when it matters with a focus on greenfield work critical path systems or when the team is blocked
• Set and uphold engineering standards for your team: testing strategy evaluation frameworks model observability and responsible deployment practices
• Know when to write the code yourself and when your highest-leverage move is unblocking someone else

Build and Operate Production AI Systems

• Oversee the design and operation of LLM-powered features ETL pipelines agentic workflows and/or document extraction systems
• Maintain a high bar for production quality: latency cost reliability and behavioral consistency across a diverse multi-tenant customer base
• Build feedback loops and monitoring that detect model drift degraded outputs and edge case failures before customers do

Collaborate Across the Organization

• Work with peer engineering teams platform engineering and data engineering to share infrastructure avoid duplication and raise the AI platforms overall capability
• Communicate clearly to surface risks early quantify tradeoffs and clear a path to rapid development and iteration for you team
• Occasionally engage directly with customers customer success or implementation teams to ground your teams work in real-world usage patterns

Required Qualifications

• 5 years of experience in machine learning AI engineering or applied data science
• 13 years of direct people management or formal tech lead experience with responsibility for team delivery
• Hands-on production experience with one or more of: LLM-powered applications agentic workflows document extraction pipelines or classical ML systems
• Proficiency in Python and familiarity with the modern AI engineering stack LangChain/LangGraph (or equivalent) vector databases prompt engineering and model evaluation tooling
• Experience deploying and operating AI systems in a cloud environment (AWS preferred)
• Strong written and verbal communication skills able to write a crisp design doc run a productive design review and give clear status to non-technical stakeholders
• Bachelors degree in Computer Science Engineering Mathematics or a related quantitative field

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in B2B SaaS insurance financial services or another regulated vertical
• Familiarity with MLOps tooling
• Exposure to intelligent document processing for example parsing PDFs structured tables or semi-structured data at scale
• Experience with LLM observability and AI gateway tooling (e.g. LangSmith Helicone Portkey LiteLLM)
• Background building systems with human-in-the-loop workflows and agentic task orchestration

Why This Role

Youll have real ownership of a team of a technical domain and of shipped product used by insurance professionals across North America. Youll have leadership who is fully committed to delivering real AI value to customers and invest in your growth. And youll be operating in an industry that is genuinely early in its AI transformation with the data infrastructure and customer relationships already in place to make the work matter.

Additional Requirements and Details:

THE VERTAFORE STORY

Over the past 50 years Vertafore has advanced the entire insurance distribution channel with the best software solutions in the industry. Today were proud to say hundreds of thousands of Vertafore users rely on our solutions to write business faster reduce costs and fuel growth by increasing collaboration and streamlining processes. Vertafore leads the industry with secure cloud-based mobile products that provide superior reporting and analytics delivering actionable insight right when customers need it most. We partner with other leading technology companies to deliver comprehensive solutions to improve the way our customers do business and serve their customers.

The Vertafore Way

Insurance is about relationships and technology should make those relationships stronger. Thats why at Vertafore its our mission to transform the way the industry operates by putting people at the heart of insurance technology. By focusing on our customers becoming better every day and delivering results you can see we provide the level oftrustandsecuritythat insurance is all about.

Bias to Action: Were united by an innate drive to take action and make a difference in the technology and insurance spaces.

Win Together: We work together as one team showing empathy and respect along the way.

Show Up Curious: We work to challenge one another to push boundaries and think beyond the box.

Say It Do It: We honor every one of our commitments because integrity is important to us.

Customer Success is Our Success: We cultivate authentic relationships and follow up by actively listening to their needs.

We Love Insurance: We appreciate the impact insurance has on the world.

Is this role not an exact fit for you Keep an eye on our Careers Page for other positions!

Vertafore is a drug free workplace and conducts preemployment drug and background screenings.

The selected candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the job responsibilities duties skill or working addition this document does not create an employment contract implied or otherwise other than an at will relationship.

Vertafore strongly supports equal employment opportunity for all applicants regardless of race color religion sex gender identity pregnancy national origin ancestry citizenship age marital status physical disability mental disability medical condition sexual orientation genetic information or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law.

We do not accept resumes from agencies headhunters or other suppliers who have not signed a formal agreement with us.