AI Platform Engineer; hybrid

The Company

At Utica National Insurance Group, over 1,400 employees countrywide take our corporate promise to heart every day:
To make people feel secure, appreciated, and respected.

While we had humble beginnings in 1914, today the Utica National Insurance Group is an “A” rated $2B award‑winning, nationally recognized organization providing personal and commercial property & casualty insurance products and services.

Our Mission is to continually meet the needs of our policyholders, agent/customers and employees resulting in sustainable profitable growth in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

We are proud to sell our products through more than 2,200 independent insurance agents around the country as we have been since 1928. These agents provide their clients with valuable insight and resources. And, as the second‑largest insurer of Agents’ Errors and Omissions (E&O) business in the United States, we insure many of the agents who work with our policyholders.

Our purpose is to make people feel secure, appreciated, and respected. These values define the character of our employees. They personify Utica National – describing what it means to “be Utica National” and how we approach doing business. Together, with our agents, we are committed to providing our mutual policyholders with valuable services and products to help them feel secure.

Platform Evaluation & Adoption- Evaluate capabilities to determine how to support prioritized use cases;
Lead proofs‑of‑concept (PoCs) and pilot programs to validate usability within our ecosystems;
Collaborate with internal teams to ensure secure and effective use of AI‑driven tools.

Platform Architecture & Implementation- Design and deploy AI/ML platform components using Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, Azure AI Search, Azure Storage, Key Vault, and Private Endpoints/VNET;
Establish secure connectivity patterns, RBAC, and identity management with Microsoft Entra ;
Implement observability and telemetry using Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

MLOps & Dev Ops Enablement
- Build CI/CD pipelines in Azure Dev Ops or Git Hub for model training, evaluation, and deployment;
Manage versioning for datasets, models, prompts, and agent configurations;
Automate environment provisioning and enforce promotion gates for Development Test UAT Production.

Agent & Copilot Integration- Enable conversational experiences using Microsoft Copilot Studio and integrate advanced use cases with Azure AI Foundry;
Connect enterprise data sources (SharePoint, Dataverse, Graph connectors) securely for grounding AI agents.

Security & Compliance- Implement governance controls for PII, data classification, and auditability;
Define SLAs, cost guardrails, and incident response playbooks for AI services.

Insurance Domain Integration- Collaborate with business units (Policy, Claims, Underwriting, Customer Experience) to align AI platform capabilities with operational needs.

Performs other duties as assigned.

Conforms with all corporate policies and procedures.

Bachelor's Degree Preferred.

• 5+ years in software development and solution design with cloud platforms (preferably Microsoft Azure) required;
• 2+ years hands‑on experience in AI/ML (LLMs or classical ML), including deployment and operationalization required;
  Less than 2 years Proven experience with Azure AI services: AI Foundry, Azure ML, AI Search, Key Vault, Monitor, Container Registry required;
• Familiarity with enterprise security practices, private networking, and governance frameworks. required;
• Experience with and strong understanding of MLOps, CI/CD, and infrastructure‑as‑code required;
  Experience with Copilot Studio and conversational AI integration preferred;
• Insurance industry experience. Knowledge of policy, claims, underwriting, and compliance requirements preferred;
• Experience with vector search, prompt engineering, and responsible AI principles preferred;
• Exposure to Microsoft Graph and enterprise data connectors preferred;
• Ability to design scalable architectures with cost optimization and operational resilience preferred.

Salary Range: $112,000 to $149,000

The final salary to be paid and…