System Architect Director AI Innovation

You have a clear vision of where your career can go. And we have the leadership to help you get there.At CNA we strive to create a culture in which people know they matter and are part of something important ensuring the abilities of all employees are used to their fullest potential.

JOB DESCRIPTION:

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

Performs a combination of duties in accordance with departmental guidelines:

• Owns and evolve architecture and execution roadmap converting business problems into scalable secure AI solutions and reusable patterns.

• Leads hands-on delivery of AI solutions partnering directly with engineers and business teams from prototype to pilot and production.

• Architects and implements agentic solutions (single/multi-agent workflows) with safe autonomy.

• Implements rigorous evaluation frameworks for LLMs/agents and drive continuous quality improvement.

• Demonstrates exceptional ability to build and nurture relationships across a diverse set of stakeholders.

• Architects knowledge grounding systems to improve accuracy traceability and audit readiness.

• Accelerates engineering throughput using agentic coding workflows (e.g. Claude Code) to automate routine engineering tasks while ensuring changes are reviewed and verified via standard SDLC controls.

• Enables Claude Code safely in enterprise environments defining usage guardrails for file edits/command execution secrets handling and auditing.

• Influences PI planning and backlog by defining architectural outcomes and Enabler Epics; contributes expert input to WSJF prioritization to balance value feasibility risk and time-to-impact.

• Drives measurable adoption and delivery velocity removing blockers standardizing accelerators/templates for copilots and agents and enabling reuse across teams.

• Builds and leads high-performing AI innovation talent hiring and developing hands-on builders coaching technical leadership and sustaining an innovative pipeline.

May perform additional duties as assigned.

Reporting Relationship

Typically Director or above

Skills Knowledge & Abilities

• Systems architecture expertise across distributed systems cloud-native patterns APIs/service-based design event-driven architecture and scalable workflow solutions.

• Applied AI / GenAI depth including LLM solution patterns prompt engineering model selection/routing and production integration with enterprise apps and data.

• Agentic system design capability for multi-step automation (single/multi-agent) including orchestration state/memory patterns tool integration and safe autonomy controls (permissions approvals auditability).

• Ontology and semantic layer proficiencycanonical entity/relationship modeling business rules and semantic consistency to improve AI grounding reasoning and explainability.

• Knowledge grounding and retrieval expertisevector search hybrid retrieval reranking knowledge graph patterns citations/traceability and measurable accuracy improvements.

• AIOps engineering strengthversioning CI/CD for AI systems automated eval gates monitoring/observability reliability and cost/performance optimization.

• Responsible AI security and compliance-by-designprivacy protections secrets handling access controls leakage prevention audit logging and model risk governance aligned to enterprise standards.

• Strong SDLC and hands-on engineering skillscoding best practices design/code reviews pull request quality controls testing strategies refactoring and operational readiness.

• Scaled Agile (SAFe) leadershipdecomposing strategy into Enabler Epics shaping PI outcomes influencing WSJF prioritization and coaching teams/ARTs to deliver with speed and quality.

• Exceptional leadership and communicationability to influence cross-functionally negotiate tradeoffs mentor technical talent and drive an innovation pipeline from experimentation to measurable business impact.

Education & Experience

• A bachelors degree in computer science Information Technology Engineering or an equivalent field is required. Masters degree in Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Data Science Software Engineering or a related discipline is preferred.

• Experienced in delivery Consulting and Regulated domain preferred experience (insurance/financial services).

• 10 years in software engineering and technical delivery including ownership of large-scale distributed enterprise systems and end-to-end SDLC.

• Strong hands-on background in Python AI and cloud platformsincluding GCP with GCP Agent platform and Gemini.

• 5 years in system/solution architecture applying frameworks and producing architectural artifacts reference architecture and technical guardrails.

• 5 years of people leadership managing and mentoring teams.

#LI-KJ1 #LI-HYBRID

In certain jurisdictions CNA is legally required to include a reasonable estimate of the compensation for this District of Columbia California Colorado Connecticut Illinois Maryland Massachusetts New York and Washington the national base pay range for this job level is $97000 to $189000 determinations are based on various factors including but not limited to relevant work experience skills certifications and location. CNA offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits package to help our employees and their family members achieve their physical financial emotional and social wellbeing goals. For a detailed look at CNAs benefits please visit.

CNA is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities in the recruitment process. To request an accommodation please contact.