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Lead AI Architect - AI
About Cigna Healthcare
Cigna Healthcare is a global health service company dedicated to transforming healthcare. With roots in the U.S. and operations in over 30 countries, we serve more than 180 million customers and patients worldwide. Ranked 13th on the Fortune 500 in 2025, Cigna is recognised as one of the most trusted and influential names in the industry.
Our mission is to improve the health, well-being, and peace of mind of those we serve.
Join our globally recognised brand, where trust, communication, and a positive culture are at the core of everything we do. Our leadership is consistent, approachable, and supportive—ensuring your well-being and work-life balance.
We're looking for individuals who thrive in collaborative environments, are passionate about meaningful change, and want to grow in a company that puts people first.
At Cigna, you'll be part of a purpose-driven team that values innovation, compassion, and impact. Whether you're shaping better care experiences or supporting customers through life's key moments, your work will matter.
Grow with us—and help shape the future of healthcare.
Purpose of This Role
The Lead AI Architect (AI) is responsible for defining, adopting, and assuring AI-enabled data architectures that are commercially viable, technically robust, and aligned to Cigna’s enterprise and data strategy.
As part of the International Health Global Architecture function, this role:
- Sets architectural direction
- Ensures strategic priorities are realised through data and AI delivery
This role drives innovation, productivity, and operational improvements, and customer experience transformation by applying modern AI architecture in a secure, scalable, and responsible manner.
Collaborates closely with business leaders, product teams, engineering, and third-party partners to ensure data and AI investments deliver measurable value, while meeting regulatory, operational, and security requirements.
Main Duties / Responsibilities
Strategy & Architecture Leadership
- Architect and own enterprise-scale Generative AI platforms supporting multiple business use cases:
- Internal pilots
- Automation assistants
- Knowledge discovery
- Customer-facing AI experiences
- Define and maintain reference target-state data and AI architectures for International Markets, aligned to enterprise architecture standards and data strategy.
- Act as a senior architectural authority for AI-enabled data solutions, ensuring consistency, reuse, and long-term sustainability across the landscape.
- Advocate for AI-driven data design, embedding modern AI and analytics patterns into enterprise data platforms and services.
- Maintain an active awareness of emerging trends:
- Data architecture
- AI/ML
- Enterprise technology
- Assess their potential impact and value for Cigna, advising senior leadership on AI strategy, feasibility, and adoption paths.
AI Architecture
- Define architectural patterns and standards to support:
- AI model lifecycle management
- AI and data pipelines
- Feature engineering
- Associated design artefacts
- Architect and own enterprise-scale Generative AI platforms supporting business use cases (as mentioned above).
- Define and maintain reference architectures and design patterns for LLM-based applications, covering:
- Model access
- Orchestration
- Retrieval
- Prompt management
- Evaluation
- Observability
- Ensure AI architectures support needs of data science, analytics, and AI use cases:
- Scalability
- Performance
- Data quality
- Governance
- Work with Solution Architects and engineering teams to translate business and technical requirements into coherent end-to-end data and AI solution designs.
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Delivery & Governance
- Participate across the full delivery lifecycle:
- Early concept shaping and investment cases
- Design assurance and governance
- Build and implementation
- Provide architecture governance through:
- Design reviews
- Standards definition
- Participation in architecture review and approval forums
- Capture and manage architectural risks, issues, and assumptions, articulating financial, operational, and delivery impacts.
- Support sponsors in creat[ing] well-rounded and compelling business cases for data and AI-led change.
Stakeholder & Commercial Leadership
- Proactively engage with stakeholders across Business, IT, and third-party partners to ensure:
- Cost-effectiveness
- Appropriateness
- Alignment to business outcomes
- Take a lead role in:
- Selection and assessment of third-party data and AI solutions
- Establishing and maintaining effective supplier and partner relationships
- Apply strong commercial awareness, including:
- Financial planning
- Budgeting
- Cost-benefit considerations
Capability Building & Mentoring
- Provide high-level mentoring and guidance to architects, design, and development teams to embed:
- Data and AI principles
- Standards
- Best practices
- Take a lead role in:
- Explaining selection and assessment of third-party data and AI solutions
- Establishing and maintaining effective supplier and partner relationships
- Contribute to the maturity of Cigna’s data and AI architecture capability through:
- Knowledge sharing
- Standards development
- Continuous improvement
Skills & Experience
Essential Experience
- Demonstrated expertise in architecting and leading large-scale AI initiatives, taking solutions from proof of concept through to successful production deployment.
- Deep understanding of architectural considerations and trade-offs in AI and machine learning projects, built through hands-on delivery experience.
- Experience working effectively within globally distributed teams and complex stakeholder environments.
Generative AI & Core Concepts
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Embeddings
- Prompt engineering
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Knowledge bases
- Multimodal embeddings
- Agentic AI workflows
- Model Context Protocol (MCP)
- Context management
- Knowledge of:
- Foundational models
- Inference profiles
- Regional hosting and restrictions of various models
- Ability to identify the right model for requirements
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AI Architecture & Tooling
- Awareness of AI Gateway/model access layer design and access controls on gateways.
- Proficiency in designing and implementing AI Gateway/model access layers for secure, scalable model access.
- Experience in architecting solutions with:
- Vector databases
- Semantic search
- Experience leveraging document intelligence platforms (e.g., Azure Form Recognizer, AWS Textract, Google Document AI) for:
- Document classification
- Data extraction
- Entity recognition from varied formats:
- Scanned documents
- PDFs
- Handwritten forms
- Experience with Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solutions:
- Automated ingestion
- Parsing
- Validation
- Accurate routing of documents
- Familiarity with workflow orchestration frameworks:
- Example: LangChain, LangGraph
- Processing pipelines including:
- Document routing
- Exception handling
- Integration with downstream systems
- Understanding of:
- Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
- Natural Language Processing techniques
- Entity linking
- Awareness of:
- Data validation
- Quality checks
- Document lifecycle management (for compliance and reliability)
- Experience with end-to-end AI pipelines:
- Ingestion
- Retrieval
- Generation
- Evaluation
- Rollout
- Familiarity with:
- AI governance
- Model lifecycle considerations
- Responsible use of data and AI, particularly within regulated environments
Qualifications
- Advanced degree in:
- Computer Science
- Artificial Intelligence
- Machine Learning
- Related field
- 10+ years experience in building and architecting large-scale software or AI systems in medium-to-large enterprises
- 5+ years experience in:
- AI/ML
- NLP
- Generative AI
- Work experience in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments (e.g., healthcare, finance, insurance, global enterprises)
- Strong communication skills with ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders and English fluency at C2 level.
Benefits
- Competitive salary
- Multicultural and hybrid working environment
- Private Medical Insurance
- Employee Wellbeing Benefits
- Educational Development Program
[Fair Pay Guidelines]
Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital or familial status, genetic information, status with regard to public assistance, citizenship status or any other characteristic protected by applicable equal employment opportunity laws.
If you require reasonable accommodation in completing the online application process, please contact: SeeYourselfEMEA@cigna.com. (Do not email this address for updates on your application or to provide a resume, you will not receive a response.)
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