Senior AI Engineer

Medica is a nonprofit health plan with more than a million members that serves communities in Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Missouri, and beyond. We deliver personalized health care experiences and partner closely with providers to ensure members are genuinely cared for.

We're a team that owns our work with accountability, makes data-driven decisions, embraces continuous learning, and celebrates collaboration - because success is a team sport. It's our mission to be there in the moments that matter most for our members and employees. Join us in creating a community of connected care, where coordinated, quality service is the norm and every member feels valued.

Medica is seeking a Senior AI Software Engineer to design, build, and scale our next-generation AI agents, applications, and platform capabilities. You own complex AI solutions from technical design through production operation and help establish the engineering patterns that enable teams across Medica to build with AI safely, reliably, and quickly.

You combine strong software engineering fundamentals with hands-on experience using modern AI models, agent architectures, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling. You operate with high autonomy, turn ambiguous business and technical problems into practical solutions, and make sound architectural tradeoffs.

This role is expected to have an informed, opinionated perspective on how AI changes software engineering and how work gets done. You actively experiment with emerging technologies while maintaining a strong bias toward production reliability, measurable outcomes, security, maintainability, and appropriate use of AI in healthcare.

Key Accountabilities

40% of the job - End-To-End AI Platform Development

• Support the design, implementation, and deployment of AI pipelines and systems. Assist with evaluation setup, benchmarking, and integrating components into products. Focus on building reliable and observable systems under guidance.

35% of the job - AI Use Care Development

• Help prototype and build AI powered features. Assist in addressing healthcare and technical challenges using modern AI tools and frameworks.

20% of the job - Technical Collaboration & Code Quality

• Participate in architectural discussions, code reviews, and pair programming. Apply engineering best practices and contribute clean, maintainable code.

5% of the job - Continuous Learning

• Stay current with AI trends and tools. Explore new approaches and share learnings. Support the evaluation and adoption of emerging technologies.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience in related field
• 3+ years of AI work experience
• 5+ years of software/platform engineering experience
• Strong software development skills using Python, Go, TypeScript, or comparable backend languages.

Skills and Abilities

• Demonstrated experience designing, building, deploying, and operating cloud-native applications on AWS, Azure, GCP, or comparable platforms.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code using Terraform or comparable declarative tooling.
• Strong working knowledge of Docker, containerization, CI/CD, GitHub, and modern software delivery practices.
• Experience with Kubernetes or comparable container orchestration platforms.
• Experience designing observable production systems using logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and operational monitoring.
• Hands-on experience building applications using large language models, foundation model APIs, or modern AI development frameworks.
• Ability to design APIs, distributed services, asynchronous workflows, and reusable platform components.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, testing, reliability, security, and maintainability.
• Ability to independently navigate ambiguous technical problems, evaluate tradeoffs, and drive solutions from concept through production.
• High agency and demonstrated ability to remain current with rapidly evolving AI technologies and development practices.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain technical decisions and tradeoffs to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Preferred Qualifications

While not required, we especially want to talk if you:

• Have built and operated production AI agents or agentic applications rather than only prototypes.
• Have hands-on experience with agent frameworks or SDKs such as LangGraph, OpenAI Agents SDK, AutoGen, or comparable technologies.
• Understand agent architecture patterns including orchestrator-worker, routing, delegation, tool use, handoffs, memory, context management, and multi-agent communication.
• Have designed systematic evaluations for AI systems, including task success, accuracy, tool/function calling, safety, latency, reliability, or cost.
• Can articulate when to use RAG, prompting, structured workflows, agents, fine-tuning, or traditional deterministic software.
• Have experience designing retrieval systems, embeddings, vector search, semantic search, or enterprise knowledge integrations.
• Have built or integrated MCP servers, tools, or comparable protocols for connecting models to enterprise systems.
• Have experience with AI observability, tracing, evaluation, model gateways, or LLMOps tooling.
• Understand security considerations specific to AI systems, including prompt injection, data access, tool permissions, sensitive information, and agent autonomy.
• Have experience building AI solutions in healthcare or another regulated environment.
• Use AI-native development tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or comparable tools as a meaningful part of your engineering workflow.
• Have a demonstrated record of evaluating emerging technologies critically and turning promising concepts into maintainable production systems.
• Have experience mentoring engineers, establishing engineering patterns, or providing technical leadership without requiring formal people-management authority.
• Can show us production work, open-source contributions, or substantive side projects that demonstrate how you build with AI.

This position is an Office role, which requires an employee to work onsite at our Minnetonka, MN office, on average, 3 days per week.

The full salary grade for this position is $113,400 - $194,400. While the full salary grade is provided, the typical hiring salary range for this role is expected to be between $113,400 - $170,100. Annual salary range placement will depend on a variety of factors including, but not limited to, education, work experience, applicable certifications and/or licensure, the position's scope and responsibility, internal pay equity and external market salary data. In addition to base compensation, this position may be eligible for incentive plan compensation in addition to base salary. Medica offers a generous total rewards package that includes competitive medical, dental, vision, PTO, Holidays, paid volunteer time off, 401K contributions, caregiver services and many other benefits to support our employees.

The compensation and benefits information is provided as of the date of this posting. Medica's compensation and benefits are subject to change at any time, with or without notice, subject to applicable law.

Eligibility to work in the US: Medica does not offer work visa sponsorship for this role. All candidates must be legally authorized to work in the United States at the time of application. Employment is contingent on verification of identity and eligibility to work in the United States.

We are an Equal Opportunity employer, where all qualified candidates receive consideration for employment indiscriminate of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, citizenship, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or any other protected characteristic.