Principal AI Platform Engineer

Principal Ai Platform Engineer

At PEMCO, we're all about people – our customers, our employees, and the community. We're a mutual insurance company owned by our Northwest policyholders. We provide auto, home, renters, and boat coverage. Recognized by Forbes as one of America's Best Insurance Companies in both Auto and Home for 2025, based on customer survey feedback, and by Newsweek as one of America's Greatest Midsize Workplaces 2025.

We are consistently recognized for our outstanding customer service, employee expertise, community partnerships, and social impact programs. All of which makes PEMCO a great place to work!

Our social impact programs motivate high achievement by youth in education; build stronger and greener communities; and increase safety at home, on the road, and 're committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, and to fostering an inspiring and inclusive workplace. These efforts create and cultivate an environment that builds fairness and understanding, encourages collaboration and flexibility, and celebrates all the ways in which we're different and the same – enabling all individuals to achieve their full potential.

We are seeking a Principal AI Platform Engineer, to join our community. As AI agents become mission-critical in production business workflows, PEMCO needs a leader who owns the operational reliability, governance, security, and cost management of the AI layer. In year one, this is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will build systems yourself while establishing the standards and governance framework.

As AI operations mature, you will build and scale a team to match operational demands.

The role spans both business AI use cases (in partnership with the Data, AI & Digital teams) and technology enablement use cases including IT operations, information security, help desk automation. You will be responsible for building and maintaining the enterprise agent marketplace, establishing production-grade observability, and ensuring governance and compliance across all AI deployments.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Own the operational lifecycle of AI agents deployed across PEMCO: deployment, monitoring, scaling, incident response, and retirement.
• Build and maintain observability for the AI layer, including cost tracking, latency, error rates, model performance, token usage, and production monitoring for agent workers.
• Manage agent orchestration infrastructure, including configuration, versioning, connection management, and tool registration. Current stack includes MCP-based orchestration and Azure OpenAI services.
• Establish runbooks and incident response procedures for AI agent failures. When an agent supporting a business workflow goes down, this role owns the recovery.
• Implement prompt governance controls and role-based model access per Information Security standards: PII exposure monitoring, prompt injection detection, and access enforcement. Contribute requirements and technical capabilities to Info Sec for AI-specific policy development.
• Build the enterprise agent marketplace: deploy and manage AI agents within an enterprise UI framework, ensuring discoverability, versioning, and access controls.
• Evaluate new model releases, track capability evolution, and make recommendations on model selection. Maintain a knowledge management layer for AI operations including decision logs, model inventories, and governance documentation.
• Contribute directly to AI governance and the AI Governance Working Group. Operationalize security, governance, and compliance standards defined by Information Security and Data & AI leadership across all AI deployments.
• Optimize AI infrastructure costs through model selection, caching strategies, batching, and token budget management.
• Partner with the Data & AI team on production readiness for models and agents. Data & AI owns model development, training, and AI governance policy. This role owns the operational deployment, monitoring, fallback behavior, graceful degradation, and knowledge layer integration.
• As the function matures, define team structure, secure headcount, and build a team.
• Demonstrate behaviors consistent with PEMCO's policies,…