AI Engineer Lead

We are driven to do more. More for our customers and the financial professionals who offer our products. If you are driven to do more and love the challenge of pursuing more, Athene is your kind of company. You will find we offer more than the basics to create an inclusive and dynamic work environment at our various locations.

Purpose:

Athene is accelerating its AI initiatives to transform how we serve our customers, agents, and business partners. As a leader in the insurance and annuities space, we are committed to leveraging advanced AI technologies including Generative AI, Agentic AI, and Machine Learning to drive innovation and deliver meaningful business impact.

We’re hiring in our Strategy & Innovation team, which leads Athene’s AI Strategy and experimentation efforts. Our work centers on shaping the enterprise AI vision and strategy, identifying high-value use cases, and running structured experiments that validate ideas quickly. You’ll join a small, collaborative group that partners closely with business units, IT, and Apollo to align priorities and ensure AI adoption moves forward in a coordinated, business-driven way. This is a high-impact role where you’ll help translate strategy into action, test new capabilities, and guide promising solutions toward implementation.

As the Lead AI Engineer, you'll play a key role in shaping Athene's AI future through technical leadership in our experimentation initiatives, vendor evaluations, and strategic assessments.

Accountabilities:

• Lead technical experimentation by designing and executing targeted, short-cycle tests to validate AI ideas and vendor tools before they move toward production.

• Bridge technical gaps by translating complex AI concepts between business stakeholders and IT teams.

• Assess AI readiness by evaluating data quality, accessibility, governance requirements, and technical infrastructure.

• Develop strategic prototypes that demonstrate business value and highlight implementation considerations.

• Support vision and blueprint development by contributing technical expertise to long-term AI direction-setting.

• Evaluate vendor solutions with rigorous technical assessments of AI platforms and tools (e.g., Writer, Shelf, Glean, Claude).

• Drive data strategy by identifying requirements, gaps, and integration needs across business units.

• Document experiment findings through comprehensive technical documentation.

• Partner across teams, working with business units, IT, and Apollo on readiness, governance, and validation activities.

• Shape technical standards for AI experimentation, prompt engineering, data preparation, and evaluation methodologies.

Qualifications and Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field, plus 7+ years of experience in AI, data science, or software engineering, including 2+ years building GenAI/LLM/Agentic AI solutions; advanced AI/ML certifications (AWS, DeepLearning.AI, etc.) highly desirable.

• Deep expertise in GenAI frameworks and techniques (LangChain, RAG architectures, prompt engineering), modern LLMs (Claude, GPT-4o/5, Gemini), strong Python skills, and hands-on experience with AWS AI services (Bedrock, SageMaker, Lambda).

• Experience designing targeted tests to validate technical hypotheses and business assumptions, evaluating AI platforms/tools against business and technical requirements, and ensuring data quality, integration, governance, and compliance in regulated environments.

• Strong ability to translate business challenges into technical approaches, connect experimentation to broader strategic goals, and clearly communicate complex concepts to executives and technical specialists, with a proven track record of cross-functional collaboration.

Drive. Discipline. Confidence. Focus. Commitment.  Learn more about working at Athene.

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Athene is committed to inclusion and is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer.  We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status or any other status protected by federal, state or local law.