IT Principal

This position within the AI Center of Enablement represents the apex of technical leadership for AI engineering across The Cigna Group. It defines the future of AI engineering capabilities and makes critical technical decisions with multi‑year impact. The AI Engineering Principal serves as the organization's foremost authority on AI platform engineering, combining unparalleled technical depth with strategic vision, organizational influence, and the ability to drive transformational change in how the enterprise builds and deploys AI systems.

This role establishes a multi‑year technical strategy for AI platform evolution, architects foundational platforms enabling hundreds of use cases, drives adoption of emerging AI paradigms across the enterprise, and shapes technical standards that influence hundreds of engineers and thousands of AI applications.

• Define long‑term AI platform strategy and anticipate technology shifts.
• Make foundational architectural decisions shaping enterprise AI for years.
• Champion strategic investments for sustainable healthcare AI advantage.
• Establish technical principles and reference architectures as organizational standards.
• Architect and implement enterprise AI platforms on AWS balancing speed, security, HIPAA compliance, and cost.
• Create frameworks that simplify complexity and accelerate AI development.
• Build advanced RAG systems with graph databases, vector stores, and intelligent retrieval.
• Develop agent frameworks for planning, tool use, and multi‑agent collaboration.
• Implement techniques like model distillation, fine‑tuning, synthetic data generation, and evaluation pipelines.
• Deliver observability platforms for model performance and cost tracking.
• Build security and compliance frameworks addressing prompt injection, data leakage, adversarial attacks, and HIPAA.

• Bachelor’s in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 12+ years in software engineering, 6+ years building production AI/ML systems at scale.
• Expert in Python and AI frameworks; recognized contributions to open source or standards.
• Proven experience architecting AI platforms serving thousands of users or millions of requests.
• Deep knowledge of LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Llama) and model architectures.
• Mastery of orchestration frameworks (Lang Chain, Pydantic‑AI, Lang Graph).
• Advanced expertise in RAG architectures and query optimization.
• Expert‑level AWS knowledge including Bedrock, Sage Maker, and cost optimization.

Remote work:
If you will be working at home occasionally or permanently, the internet connection must be obtained through a cable broadband or fiber optic internet service provider with speeds of at least 10 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload.

Compensation:
For this position, we anticipate offering an annual salary of $149,000 – $248,300 USD per year, depending on relevant factors, including experience and geographic location. This role is also anticipated to be eligible to participate in an annual bonus and long‑term incentive plan.

Benefits:
At The Cigna Group, you’ll enjoy a comprehensive range of benefits with a focus on supporting your whole health. Starting on day one of your employment, you’ll be offered several health‑related benefits including medical, vision, dental, and well‑being and behavioral health programs. We also offer 401(k), company‑paid life insurance, tuition reimbursement, a minimum of 18 days of paid time off per year and paid holidays.

For more details on our employee benefits programs, .

Doing something meaningful starts with a simple decision, a commitment to changing lives. At The Cigna Group, we’re dedicated to improving the health and vitality of those we serve. Through our divisions Cigna Healthcare and Evernorth Health Services, we are committed to enhancing the lives of our clients, customers and patients. Join us in driving growth and improving lives.

Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions including but not limited to lactation, sexual…