AI Engineer - Data Engineer

Fortegra is seeking an Internal AI Forward Deployed Software Engineer to stay ahead of cutting-edge AI developments, rapidly prototype proofs-of-concept (POCs), and advise our organization's various technology teams on integrating the best AI solutions into their platforms and products. You'll be the go-to expert in bridging emerging AI technologies with our internal tech needs, enabling nimble adoption across teams and deploying AI apps in production. 

Roles and Responsibilities 

• Monitor and stay current with the AI technology landscape, including new models, frameworks, tools, and research across areas such as LLMs, multimodal AI, agentic systems, and orchestration platforms, to inform internal recommendations and solution design. 

• Operate with flexibility across software and data initiatives, contributing where business needs and priorities are most critical. Adapting readily to support both software engineering and data-focused projects as priorities and requirements shift will be integral to the role. Data-focused projects involve supporting our data infrastructure in terms of platform enhancements or building new data processes to support business needs. 

• Engage with internal stakeholders to identify high-value AI opportunities, define use cases, and rapidly prototype tailored solutions that integrate with our APIs, data pipelines, and internal platforms for workflows such as analytics, automation, and decision support. 

• Advise teams on the selection and implementation of AI solutions by assessing trade-offs across accuracy, latency, scalability, security, and cost, and guide the evolution of prototypes into production-ready applications. 

• Own end-to-end delivery of AI initiatives, from ideation and scoping through prototyping, testing, deployment, monitoring, and iterative optimization in internal production environments. Build a sharp eye for continuously validating AI-driven processes and evaluating their outputs for accuracy, effectiveness, and trustworthiness. 

• Identify reusable patterns, shared components, and platform enhancement opportunities emerging from AI projects, and partner with core engineering teams to improve maintainability, scalability, security, and operational resilience. 

• Conduct workshops, demos, and knowledge-sharing sessions to educate teams on AI best practices, emerging tools, and Fortegra's evolving AI capabilities, helping drive organization-wide adoption and responsible usage. 

• Operate effectively across multiple high-priority initiatives, contributing as an engineer, technical advisor, researcher, and communicator in a fast-moving and often ambiguous environment. 

The above cited duties and responsibilities describe the general nature and level of work performed by people assigned to the job.  They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all the duties and responsibilities that an incumbent may be expected or asked to perform.

Required Skills and Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field required;  Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related discipline with a focus on AI or machine learning is preferred. 

• 3 to 5 years of software engineering experience, including hands-on development of AI-enabled applications and solutions using modern cloud-based AI platforms such as Azure Machine Learning or Azure AI Studio. Experience with Azure is strongly preferred. 

• Proven track record of rapidly building POCs and advising on AI integration strategies, with strong knowledge of current AI trends, leading model families, evaluation approaches, and practical enterprise use cases. 

• Experience with developer tooling such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and Cursor is required. 

• Strong full-stack engineering skills, including proficiency in React-based web development and the ability to review, understand, and refine AI-generated code. Experience designing or implementing agentic workflows is highly valued. Familiarity with FastAPI is preferred. 

• Experience working with frontier models from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google within a Git-based development environment. Familiarity with GitHub-based CI/CD workflows and the use of AI tools for automated testing, including tools such as Playwright, is strongly preferred. 

• Demonstrated ability to work with speed and flexibility across multiple priorities, debug complex AI-driven systems, and deliver effective solutions under tight timelines. 

• Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to work effectively in matrixed organizations and translate complex technical concepts for both technical and non-technical audiences. 
• Clear commitment to continuous learning, with an established habit of staying current on AI developments through research papers, newsletters, hands-on experimentation, and industry forums.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Insurance or Financial Services domain experience
• Experience building AI-enabled products or developer tooling
• Familiarity with LLMs, AI agents, and prompt engineering
• Experience with serverless and cloud-native architectures

What Makes This Role Unique: 

• Work in an AI-first engineering environment
• Use modern AI developer tools to dramatically accelerate development
• Join a high-impact engineering team focused on rapid innovation

Full benefit package including medical, dental, life, vision, company paid short/long term disability, 401(k), tuition assistance and more.

The anticipated salary for this position is $110,000 - $190,000 per year, based on qualifications and experience.

Fortegra has recently been made aware of unauthorized communications regarding career opportunities by individuals not associated with Fortegra or our recruitment team. Fortegra will only contact you from the Fortegra domain address (fortegra.com). If you receive a message from someone posing as a Fortegra recruiter via text message, WhatsApp, Telegram or other messaging platform, please report it as phishing and block the sender.

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