LEAD AI SOLUTIONS ENGINEER - NEW BUSINESS
(Full Time, Salary, Exempt)
Looking to join a growing company dedicated to helping others? We offer that, plus competitive salaries, a culture of learning, and a fast-paced environment. This is a hybrid position with 3 days in-office. Join our team to help make a difference in the lives of others!
Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. We do not sponsor employment visas or other immigration processes to attain or maintain employment eligibility. Remote positions are open to applicants based anywhere in the continental U.S. Hybrid positions are open to applicants based in the Austin, Texas area.
About Continental General:
The Continental General family of companies has provided insurance, including life and long-term care policies, to individuals and groups for over 30 years, and currently supports over 200,000 policyholders. Both our insurance company, Continental General Insurance Company, and our third-party administrator, Continental General Services, are committed to the continuous development of our infrastructure, processes, and people. The group is actively growing through expansion of both its insurance portfolio and its administrative services. With each opportunity, we take a collaborative approach to address challenges and provide unique solutions.
Position Summary:
The Lead AI Solutions Engineer is a fundamentally different role from traditional software engineering. This role exists within small, domain-aligned delivery teams of 3–5 members where AI is not a supplemental tool, itis the operating model. These teams are designed to deliver at a scale and velocity that far exceeds traditional engineering teams by leveraging AI as a force multiplier across every phase of the delivery lifecycle.
This role carries a dual mandate:
- How you build - Design, operate, and continuously evolve near-autonomous, AI-driven delivery pipelines. From requirements decomposition through deployed, tested, and monitored code, the objective is minimal human intervention with maximum engineering judgment applied at critical decision points.
- What you build - Deliver AI-native solutions that fundamentally re-imagine how users interact with insurance systems. This means extreme flattening of traditional UI layers in favor of intelligent, AI-enabled interfaces. The solutions themselves should be as autonomous as the pipelines that produce them, self-monitoring, self-healing, and requiring minimal human oversight.
These teams operate as domain owners within value stream verticals aligned to core insurance business functions (e.g., Sales Solutions, Customer Solutions, Financial Solutions). Each team owns full-stack delivery including platform, integration, and business-facing systems within their assigned domain. There are no hand-offs to other teams for design, architecture, or implementation. Ownership is real and accountability is complete.
The Lead AI Solutions Engineer operates within a regulated Life, Annuity & Health insurance environment. Autonomous delivery and intelligent solutions must be built within the boundaries of HIPAA, SOC 2, and State Department of Insurance regulations. The aspiration is to push right to the edge of those boundaries, not to avoid them, but to maximize the value of autonomy within the constraints that protect policyholders and the enterprise.
The organization follows principles derived from Team Topologies and Amazon's Single Threaded Owner model. Domain delivery teams are supported by platform teams (Infrastructure/Cloud, IT Operations) who manage organizational commons such as AWS account management, core networking, and edge ingress/egress. Enablement teams (DevOps, QA) provide knowledge resources and maintain separation of duties, with DevOps holding administrative authority over final production deployments. An umbrella security team provides overarching governance. An AI Steering Committee sets enterprise AI strategy and governance guardrails. AI consultants are available to teams for tooling landscape evaluation and guidance.
The primary AI development vehicle is Claude Code via AWS Bedrock, but the toolchain is explicitly non-fixed. The landscape is evolving rapidly, and these teams are expected to evolve with it, evaluating, adopting, and discarding tools as the technology advances. The organization empowers teams to find the right tools for their needs while maintaining alignment with enterprise governance.
Key Responsibilities:
- AI-Native Engineering & Delivery
- Design, build, and operate AI-driven delivery pipelines that approach near-autonomous execution from requirements decomposition and story generation through code generation, testing, security scanning, and deployment orchestration.
- Build and maintain self-monitoring and self-healing systems that minimize the need for human intervention in production operations, while maintaining audit traceability required by HIPAA, SOC 2, and State’s Department of Insurance regulatory frameworks.
- Leverage AI agents and agentic workflows across the full software delivery lifecycle, including automated test generation and execution, AI-driven code review, anomaly detection, and auto-remediation.
- Continuously evaluate, adopt, and evolve AI toolchains and development methodologies, maintaining alignment with the AI Steering Committee's governance framework while exercising team-level autonomy in tool selection.
- Operate within CI/CD pipelines and collaborate with DevOps enablement teams for production deployment authority, maintaining clean separation of duties.
- Intelligent Solution Design & Architecture
- Design and deliver AI-native solutions that replace traditional, UI-heavy interactions with intelligent, AI-enabled interfaces that are conversational, predictive, and adaptive.
- Architect cloud-native solutions on AWS, leveraging managed services and serverless patterns in alignment with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
- Design secure integration solutions connecting cloud-based applications with vendor SaaS platforms and internal systems, ensuring data security, integrity, and compliance with HIPAA and SOC 2 requirements.
- Apply intelligent automation, predictive analytics, and AI-assisted workflows to improve operational efficiency, customer experience, and business decision-making within insurance domain systems.
- Own all system-specific cloud architectural elements within the team's domain, consuming shared platform services (networking, account management, edge infrastructure) provided by platform teams.
- Domain Ownership & Value Stream Delivery
- Operate as a member of a small, high-accountability delivery team (3–5 members) aligned to a specific business domain within a value stream vertical.
- Own full-stack delivery within the assigned domain including platform, integration, and business/customer-facing solutions and systems.
- Align delivery outcomes to value stream objectives, understanding how technical decisions impact business results in the context of Life, Annuity & Health insurance operations.
- Take genuine ownership of domain systems end-to-end, including architecture decisions, solution design, implementation, and production health.
- Collaboration & Organizational Alignment
- Collaborate with platform teams (Infrastructure/Cloud, IT Operations) to consume and contribute to shared organizational services and standards.
- Engage with enablement teams (DevOps, QA) as knowledge resources and partners, respecting separation of duties while driving delivery velocity.
- Align with the enterprise AI Steering Committee on governance, strategy, and evolving AI standards.
- Consult with organizational AI consultants on tooling landscape evaluation and emerging capabilities.
- Work with product management, business stakeholders, and vendor representatives to translate business needs into intelligent, AI-native solutions.
- Provide transparent communication on delivery status, risks, and progress to stakeholders and leadership.
- Compliance & Governance
- Operate within the regulatory frameworks governing Life, Annuity & Health insurance, including HIPAA (protected health information), SOC 2 (security controls), and State Department of Insurance regulations.
- Ensure that AI-driven delivery pipelines and autonomous solutions maintain full audit traceability and comply with enterprise security policies.
- Implement and maintain security best practices including authentication and authorization protocols (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML), API management, data protection, and encryption.
- Understand and respect the regulatory boundaries that constrain autonomous delivery and AI-native solutions, maximizing autonomy within those constraints rather than circumventing them.
- Continuous Evolution
- Stay at the forefront of AI engineering capabilities, emerging tools, and evolving delivery paradigms.
- Evaluate new technologies, frameworks, and AI capabilities for applicability to the team's domain and delivery model.
- Evolve personal and team delivery processes toward greater autonomy, efficiency, and quality.
- Foster a culture of experimentation and innovation within the team, encouraging the exploration of new approaches while maintaining delivery commitments.
Role Context:
The Lead AI Solutions Engineer is the technical authority within the delivery team. In a 3–5 person team, the Lead sets the technical direction, defines delivery patterns, and establishes the engineering standards that the team operates by. This is not a management role; it is a hands-on technical leadership role where you are simultaneously the team's most capable engineer and its technical compass. You define how the team builds, you architect what the team builds, and you are accountable for the technical quality and integrity of everything the team delivers. You work in close partnership with the team's manager, who owns people leadership and delivery management, while you own the technical vision and execution framework. You are expected to define the compliance guardrails that keep AI-driven delivery within regulatory boundaries, and you are the first line of technical judgment when autonomous systems encounter edge cases that require human decision-making.
Level-Specific Responsibilities:
- Define and evolve the team's AI-native delivery architecture including the pipelines, patterns, agent orchestrations, and automation frameworks the team uses to build and deliver.
- Serve as the technical authority for all architectural and design decisions within the team's domain, ensuring alignment with enterprise standards and AWS Well-Architected principles.
- Architect AI-native solutions that transform traditional insurance interactions into intelligent, autonomous experiences, designing for minimal UI, maximum AI-enabled interfacing.
- Define the compliance guardrails and security frameworks that govern the team's AI-driven delivery pipelines, ensuring HIPAA, SOC 2, and State DOI regulatory requirements are met without unnecessarily constraining delivery velocity.
- Provide hands-on technical leadership. This role writes code, reviews code, architects' solutions, and delivers alongside the team, not from a distance.
- Establish and maintain coding standards, quality benchmarks, and technical documentation practices for the team.
- Drive the evaluation, adoption, and retirement of AI tools and techniques within the team, aligning with AI Steering Committee governance while pushing the boundary of what's possible.
- Mentor all team members, with particular focus on developing Senior engineers toward Lead capability and Associates toward independence.
- Partner with the team's manager on delivery planning, estimation, and risk identification, providing technical perspective on feasibility, complexity, and approach.
- Lead incident response and complex troubleshooting, conducting root cause analysis and implementing systemic improvements.
- Represent the team's technical perspective in cross-team, vendor, and stakeholder discussions.
- Collaborate with other domain team Leads to drive consistency and share innovation across the organization.
Requirements
Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field. Equivalent practical experience will be considered.
- 6+ years of experience in software engineering, with substantial recent experience in AI-driven development and delivery.
- Demonstrated track record of technical leadership, setting direction, defining patterns, and elevating team capability.
- Expert-level proficiency with AI development tools and agentic workflows, with demonstrated experience building and operating near-autonomous delivery pipelines.
- Deep experience architecting and delivering cloud-native solutions on AWS, including managed services, serverless patterns, and Well-Architected Framework alignment.
- Strong experience designing and delivering AI-native solutions, intelligent interfaces, predictive systems, and autonomous workflows.
- Expert understanding of security protocols and standards (OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, SAML, encryption) and their application in AI-driven, regulated environments.
- Strong experience with API design, development, and management (RESTful, SOAP) at an enterprise scale.
- Proficiency across multiple programming languages with the ability to make technology selection decisions based on solution requirements.
- Deep experience with CI/CD practices and tools, including AI-enhanced pipeline automation.
- Proven ability to translate regulatory requirements into practical engineering guardrails without sacrificing delivery velocity.
- Exceptional communication skills, able to convey technical direction to the team and translate technical decisions to business stakeholders.
Competencies:
- Technical vision and direction
- Hands-on leadership
- Architectural mastery
- Mentoring and team elevation
- Problem solving at systems level
- Compliance-aware engineering
- Cross-functional influence
- Decision-making under ambiguity
Why Join Us?
- Competitive salary and benefits, including 401(k), health insurance, and performance-based bonuses.
- Collaborative and fast-paced work environment.
- Professional development and growth opportunities within the finance and investment space.
Benefits:
- Competitive Salary & Target Bonus Program
- Retirement Savings – 401(k) with a company match
- Comprehensive Medical insurance through BlueCross BlueShield of Texas. Company-paid dental, vision, short-term & long-term disability, and life insurance.
- Work-Life Balance – This role offers 20+ days of PTO, 10 paid holidays, and paid volunteer time off.
- Flexible Work Options & Perks – Hybrid opportunity, wellness programs, and weekly paid lunch for onsite staff.
- Health Savings Accounts (HSA) & Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) – Includes a company match for HSAs.
