AI Engineering Leader

$200,000 - $300,000 Total Compensation
About the Role
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 PR's, 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. Running 1:1s, setting technical direction, and creating clear paths for individual development
• Foster a culture of rigor, fast iteration, and creative problem solving. Build a team where engineers are empowered to raise problems early and move from experiment to production without unnecessary friction
• 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, from design to deployment to post-production observability
• Be the accountable technical voice for your domain: scope estimates, architectural decisions, tradeoff documentation, and post-mortems all run through you
• 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 with a focus on greenfield work, critical path systems, or when the team is blocked
• Set and uphold engineering standards for your team: testing strategy, evaluation frameworks, model observability, and responsible deployment practices
• 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: latency, cost, reliability, and behavioral consistency across a diverse multi-tenant customer base
• Build feedback loops and monitoring that detect model drift, degraded outputs, and edge case failures before customers do

Collaborate Across the Organization

• Work with peer engineering teams, platform engineering, and data engineering to share infrastructure, avoid duplication, and raise the AI platform's overall capability
• Communicate clearly to surface risks early, quantify tradeoffs, and clear a path to rapid development and iteration for you team
• Occasionally engage directly with customers, customer success, or implementation teams to ground your team's work in real-world usage patterns

Required 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 - LangChain/LangGraph (or equivalent), vector databases, prompt engineering, and model evaluation tooling
• Experience deploying and operating AI systems in a cloud environment (AWS preferred)
• Strong written and verbal communication skills - able to write a crisp design doc, run a productive design review, and give clear status to non-technical stakeholders
• 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, for example parsing PDFs, structured tables, or semi-structured data at scale
• Experience with LLM observability and AI gateway tooling (e.g., LangSmith, Helicone, Portkey, LiteLLM)
• Background building systems with human-in-the-loop workflows and agentic task orchestration

Why This Role
You'll have real ownership - of a team, of a technical domain, and of shipped product used by insurance professionals across North America. You'll have leadership who is fully committed to delivering real AI value to customers and invest in your growth. And you'll be operating in an industry that is genuinely early in its AI transformation, with the data, infrastructure, and customer relationships already in place to make the work matter.
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 (working on a computer, etc.).

• Frequent sitting and/or standing.

THE VERTAFORE STORY
Over the past 50 years, Vertafore has advanced the entire insurance distribution channel with the best software solutions in the industry. Today, we're proud to say hundreds of thousands of Vertafore users rely on our solutions to write business faster, reduce costs, and fuel growth by increasing collaboration and streamlining processes. Vertafore leads the industry with secure, cloud-based mobile products that provide superior reporting and analytics, delivering actionable insight- right when customers need it most. We partner with other leading technology companies to deliver comprehensive solutions to improve the way our customers do business and serve their customers.
The Vertafore Way
Insurance is about relationships, and technology should make those relationships stronger. That's why, at Vertafore, it's our mission to transform the way the industry operates by putting people at the heart of insurance technology. By focusing on our customers, becoming better every day, and delivering results you can see, we provide the level of trust and security that insurance is all about.• Bias to Action: We're united by an innate drive to take action and make a difference in the technology and insurance spaces.• Win Together: We work together as one team, showing empathy and respect along the way.• Show Up Curious: We work to challenge one another to push boundaries and think beyond the box.• Say It, Do It: We honor every one of our commitments because integrity is important to us.• Customer Success is Our Success: We cultivate authentic relationships and follow up by actively listening to their needs.• We Love Insurance: We appreciate the impact insurance has on the world.
Is this role not an exact fit for you? Keep an eye on our Careers Page for other positions!
Vertafore is a drug free workplace and conducts preemployment drug and background screenings .
The selected candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States.
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the job responsibilities, duties, skill, or working conditions. In addition, this document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an "at will" relationship.
Vertafore strongly supports equal employment opportunity for all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law.
We do not accept resumes from agencies, headhunters, or other suppliers who have not signed a formal agreement with us.
Vertafore is a Flexible First working environment which allows team members to work from home as often as you'd like, while using our offices as a place for collaboration, community, and teambuilding. There are times you may be asked to come into an office and/or travel for specific meetings for a specific business purpose and this varies by job responsibilities.
Why Vertafore is the place for you: *Canada Only

• The opportunity to work in a space where modern technology meets a stable and vital industry
• Medical, vision & dental plans
• Life, AD&D
• Short Term and Long Term Disability
• Pension Plan & Employer Match
• Maternity, Paternity and Parental Leave
• Employee and Family Assistance Program (EFAP)
• Education Assistance
• Additional programs - Employee Referral and Internal Recognition

Why Vertafore is the place for you: *US Only

• The opportunity to work in a space where modern technology meets a stable and vital industry
• We have a Flexible First work environment! Our North America team members use our offices for collaboration, community and team-building, with members asked to sometimes come into an office and/or travel depending on job responsibilities. Other times, our teams work from home or a similar environment.
• Medical, vision & dental plans
  • PPO & high-deductible options
• Health Savings Account & Flexible Spending Accounts Options:
  • Health Care FSA
  • Dental & Vision FSA
  • Dependent Care FSA
  • Commuter FSA
• Life, AD&D (Basic & Supplemental), and Disability
• 401(k) Retirement Savings Plain & Employer Match
• Supplemental Plans - Pet insurance, Hospital Indemnity, and Accident Insurance
• Parental Leave & Adoption Assistance
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Education & Legal Assistance
• Additional programs - Tuition Reimbursement, Employee Referral, Internal Recognition, and Wellness
• Commuter Benefits (Denver)

The selected candidate must be legally authorized to work in the United States.
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this job. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the job responsibilities, duties, skill, or working conditions. In addition, this document does not create an employment contract, implied or otherwise, other than an "at will" relationship.
Vertafore strongly supports equal employment opportunity for all applicants regardless of race, color, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, age, marital status, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, sexual orientation, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law.
The Professional Services (PS) and Customer Success (CX) bonus plans are a quarterly monetary bonus plan based upon individual and practice performance against specific business metrics. Eligibility is determined by several factors including: start date, good standing in the company, and actives status at time of payout.
The Vertafore Incentive Plan (VIP) is an annual monetary bonus for eligible employees based on both individual and company performance. Eligibility is determined by several factors including: start date, good standing in the company, and actives status at time of payout.
Commission plans are tailored to each sales role but common components include quota, MBO's and ABPMs. Salespeople receive their formal compensation plan within 30 days of hire.
Vertafore is a drug free workplace and conducts preemployment drug and background screenings.
We do not accept resumes from agencies, headhunters or other suppliers who have not signed a formal agreement with us.
We want to make sure our recruiting process is accessible for everyone. if you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please contact [email protected]
Just a note, this contact information is for accommodation requests only.