Lead AI Engineer

Job Summary

Role Summary: As a Data Scientist/Engineer at Highmark, you will play a crucial role in building and deploying innovative native AI solutions that transform the US healthcare payer experience. You will leverage your expertise in data science, machine learning, and engineering principles to extract insights, develop robust models, and integrate them into scalable products. This role requires a proactive mindset, a passion for applying AI to complex healthcare challenges, and the ability to effectively communicate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.

AI Product Development Implementation: Design, develop, and implement machine learning models and algorithms to solve specific business problems within the healthcare payer domain, contributing directly to native AI product development initiatives.

Data-Driven Insights for Healthcare: Perform in-depth data analysis to identify trends, patterns, and anomalies in large, complex healthcare datasets, translating these insights into actionable recommendations for product enhancements and strategic decisions.

Model Deployment MLOps Support: Contribute to the operationalization of AI/ML models, working closely with MLOps and engineering teams to ensure models are deployed reliably, efficiently, and with appropriate monitoring within our cloud infrastructure.

Collaboration Communication: Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams including Product Managers, other Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Software Engineers, and business stakeholders to understand requirements, refine solutions, and communicate results.

Proactive Problem Solving: Proactively identify opportunities where AI/ML can drive value, suggest innovative approaches, and contribute to the evolution of our AI capabilities within the payer landscape.

Continuous Learning Adaptation: Stay abreast of the latest advancements in AI, Generative AI, and healthcare technology, actively exploring and applying new techniques to enhance our product offerings.

Essential Responsibilities

• AI/ML Model Development: Develop, validate, and refine machine learning models (e.g., predictive, prescriptive, generative) using robust statistical and computational methods, specifically addressing challenges in claims, member engagement, provider management, or clinical operations.
• Data Acquisition Feature Engineering: Work with large, diverse healthcare datasets (e.g., claims, clinical, eligibility, provider data) to perform data cleaning, transformation, and sophisticated feature engineering to prepare data for model training.
• Programming Scripting: Write clean, efficient, and well-documented code in Python for data processing, model development, evaluation, and integration.
• Database Querying Management: Extract and manipulate data from various relational and non-relational databases, optimizing queries for performance and scalability.
• Model Evaluation Monitoring: Design and implement rigorous model evaluation strategies, track model performance over time, identify potential drift or bias, and contribute to continuous improvement efforts.
• Data Visualization Storytelling: Create compelling and interactive data visualizations and dashboards that effectively communicate complex insights and model results to both technical and business audiences.
• Cloud Platform Leverage: Utilize and optimize cloud computing resources (e.g., BigQuery, Dataproc, SageMaker, Azure ML) for data storage, processing, and model training/deployment.
• Ethical AI Compliance Contribution: Understand and apply principles of ethical AI, data privacy (HIPAA), and security best practices throughout the data science lifecycle, ensuring models are fair, transparent, and compliant.
• Documentation Knowledge Sharing: Create comprehensive documentation for models, data pipelines, and analytical processes, contributing to knowledge sharing within the team.

Qualifications

• Education: Bachelors or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Statistics, or a related quantitative technical field with a strong foundation in AI/ML principles.
• Professional Experience (3-6 years): 3-6 years of progressive experience in data science, machine learning engineering, or a related analytical role.
• Minimum 2-3 years directly applying data science methodologies to build and deploy solutions within the US healthcare payer or provider domain.
• Technical Proficiency: Python Expertise (3+ ye…