[Hiring] AI Engineering Leader @Vertafore

Role Description

Vertafore's 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.

We're looking for an AI Engineering Leader who leads from the front. You'll own delivery for one of our core AI product domains, managing a small team of engineers while staying close enough to the work that you're the person your team turns to when the architecture gets hard. You’ll 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 You'll Do

• Lead a High-Performing AI Engineering Team
  • Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 4–8 engineers.
  • Run 1:1s, set technical direction, and create clear paths for individual development.
  • Foster a culture of rigor, fast iteration, and creative problem solving.
  • 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 team's scope.
  • Be the accountable technical voice for your domain.
  • 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.
  • Set and uphold engineering standards for your team.
  • 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.
  • Build feedback loops and monitoring that detect model drift, degraded outputs, and edge case failures.
• Collaborate Across the Organization
  • Work with peer engineering teams, platform engineering, and data engineering.
  • Communicate clearly to surface risks early, quantify tradeoffs, and clear a path to rapid development and iteration for your team.
  • Occasionally engage directly with customers, customer success, or implementation teams.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience in machine learning, AI engineering, or applied data science.
• 1–3+ 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.
• Experience deploying and operating AI systems in a cloud environment (AWS preferred).
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Bachelor's 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.
• Experience with LLM observability and AI gateway tooling.
• Background building systems with human-in-the-loop workflows and agentic task orchestration.

Benefits

• Real ownership of a team, technical domain, and shipped product.
• Leadership committed to delivering real AI value to customers.
• Opportunity to operate in an industry early in its AI transformation.

Additional Requirements and Details

• Travel required up to 10% of the time.
• Located and working from an office location.
• Occasional lifting and/or moving up to 10 pounds.
• Frequent repetitive hand and arm movements required to operate a computer.
• Specific vision abilities required by this job include close vision.
• Frequent sitting and/or standing.