Head of AI Platform Engineering - Execution Plane

About Guardian Life Insurance Who we are​: Guardian is making a difference in people’s lives across the US as a leading mutual company, providing life and disability insurance, dental and workforce benefits, retirement and wealth solutions. But we offer more than products. ​ We partner with our customers to inspire well-being® — mind, body, and wallet®. Since 1860, when a community of immigrants joined together to protect their families and companies, we have embraced the spirit of mutuality as a mindset. ​ We provide solutions that build financial confidence for individuals, strengthen businesses, and help employees thrive. Working as your partner, we invest in you, holding ourselves accountable not to shareholders, but to your long-term well-being. ​ All of our colleagues share this mindset. Our collaborative culture extends beyond our workplace to uplift communities all around us. Because we believe value grows when it’s shared. ​ We're here for you today and we'll be here to deliver on our promises tomorrow. Our commitments rest on a strong financial foundation, which includes a 2026 dividend allocation of $1.7 billion, the largest in the company’s history.*​ ​ What we stand for​: We're guided by our values: we do the right thing, we believe people count, we courageously shape the future together, and we go above and beyond for the people we serve.​ Our colleagues embrace and live by these values every day. They remind us to put people at the heart of all we do so that we can help protect what matters most to you.​ Want to help us bring these values to life? Join us for a rewarding career and the opportunity to shape the future.​ Disclosures: *Dividends are not guaranteed. They are declared annually by Guardian’s Board of Directors. ​ Guardian® is a registered trademark of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. Copyright© 2026 The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America. 9020942.1 Exp. 07/28 ​

Guardian Life Insurance

Partnering with you to inspire well-being® — mind, body, and wallet®.

Life InsuranceDisability InsuranceGroup BenefitsAnnuitiesInvestmentsWell-beingDental InsuranceVision InsuranceAccident InsuranceCritical illness insurance

G

guardianlife.com

5,001-10,000 employees

Financial Services

New York , NY

1860

Privately Held

150k LinkedIn followers

• You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and technology partners to develop and integrate automation solutions that drive business growth, improve customer experiences, and reduce operational costs.
• Experience with agentic AI systems, LLM platforms, model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, MCP servers, orchestration frameworks, or AI execution engines.
• Experience with AWS-based AI execution services and cloud-native patterns, including Bedrock, AgentCore, SageMaker, Lambda, Step Functions, API Gateway, EKS, DynamoDB, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, and related DevOps tooling.
• Familiarity with RAG systems, enterprise search, vector databases, embedding models, rerankers, knowledge bases, context engineering, and governed retrieval from enterprise data sources.
• Experience designing multi-tenant runtime platforms with environment isolation, workload identities, RBAC/ABAC, cross-account access patterns, quotas, throttling, and secure service-to-service communication.
• Background in MLOps, LLMOps, AIOps, model lifecycle management, evaluation pipelines, model serving, inference optimization, or production AI operations.
• Experience with observability for AI workloads, including distributed tracing, token usage, latency, model/tool errors, cost attribution, quality metrics, safety metrics, and operational dashboards.
• Experience with performance, scalability, and cost optimization for high-volume runtime services, including caching, batching, streaming, load testing, capacity planning, and GPU/CPU optimization where applicable.
• Experience building reusable platform abstractions, SDKs, runtime adapters, reference architectures, or deployment templates that make execution technologies portable across vendors and use cases.
• Experience integrating enterprise tools, APIs, data services, and workflow systems through governed connectors rather than point-to-point application wiring.
• Comfort operating in a regulated, matrixed environment where production safety, auditability, resiliency, and vendor optionality are core design principles.

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in computer science, engineering, management or a related field.
• Strong people leadership experience managing software engineering teams, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing senior technical talent.
• Deep hands-on technical background designing, building, and operating production-grade distributed systems, AI/ML platforms, data platforms, or cloud-native runtime services.
• Experience leading teams responsible for the execution layer of a platform, including runtime services, model inference, retrieval, orchestration, tool invocation, workflow execution, or production AI operations.
• Ability to own the roadmap and delivery for execution plane capabilities such as model gateways, agent runtimes, tool/action gateways, runtime adapters, MCP services, knowledge bases, retrieval pipelines, inference services, and deployment patterns.
• Strong understanding of data access patterns, enterprise APIs, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector/search systems, context engineering, and governed access to systems of record.
• Experience building reliable, scalable, low-latency execution services with clear contracts, strong observability, graceful degradation, retry patterns, rate limits, and operational resilience.
• Ability to partner with control plane, developer experience, data engineering, security, architecture, operations, and domain application teams to ensure execution technologies operate behind governed platform interfaces.
• Proven ability to drive engineering excellence through design reviews, architecture standards, testing, CI/CD, infrastructure automation, incident response, SLOs, runbooks, and production support mechanisms.
• Strong understanding of enterprise security and compliance requirements for runtime execution, including identity propagation, auditability, data handling, least privilege access, secrets management, and environment isolation.
• Strong communication and influence skills, with the ability to simplify complex runtime, data, and AI execution topics for senior stakeholders while aligning teams around reusable platform patterns.

• Meaningful and challenging work opportunities to accelerate technology and innovation in a secure and compliant way
• Excellent medical, dental, supplemental health, life and vision coverage for you and your dependents with no wait period
• Life and disability insurance
• A great 401(k) with match
• Tuition assistance, paid parental leave and backup family care
• Dynamic, modern work environments that promote collaboration and creativity
• Flexible time off, dress code, and work location policies to balance your work and life in the ways that suit you best
• Every day, Guardian provides Americans the security they deserve through our insurance and wealth management products and services. Since our founding in 1860, our long-term view has helped our customers prepare for whatever life brings whether starting a family, planning for the future or taking care of employees. Today, we're a Fortune 250 mutual company and a leading provider of life, disability, dental, and other benefits for individuals, at the workplace and through government sponsored programs. The Guardian community of 9,500 employees and our network of over 2,700 financial representatives is committed to serving with expertise when, where and how our clients need us. Our commitments rest on a strong financial foundation, which at year-end 2018 included $8.5 billion in capital and $1.6 billion in operating income. For more information, please visit guardianlife.com or follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube.
• Guardian® is a registered trademark of the Guardian Life Insurance Company of America.
• $152,290.00 - $250,195.00
• The salary range reflected above is a good faith estimate of base pay for the primary location of the position. The salary for this position ultimately will be determined based on the education, experience, knowledge, and abilities of the successful candidate. In addition to salary, this role may also be eligible for annual, sales, or other incentive compensation.
• At Guardian, you’ll have the support and flexibility to achieve your professional and personal goals. Through skill-building, leadership development and philanthropic opportunities, we provide opportunities to build communities and grow your career, surrounded by diverse colleagues with high ethical standards.
• As part of Guardian’s Purpose – to inspire well-being – we are committed to offering contemporary, supportive, flexible, and inclusive benefits and resources to our colleagues. Explore our company benefits at www.guardianlife.com/careers/corporate/benefits. Benefits apply to full-time eligible employees. Interns are not eligible for most Company benefits.
• Notice Regarding Guardian’s Use of Artificial Intelligence in Recruitment
• As part of Guardian’s job application process, Guardian may use artificial intelligence tools (“AI Tools") to automate the sorting and filtering of information provided by applicants as part of its preliminary screening. This preliminary screening may be used to help identify applicant materials and resumes relative to their indication that the applicant meets the requirements for the specific job for which they are applying, as specified in the listing posted on Guardian’s jobs website (Careers at Guardian at https://www.guardianlife.com/careers). At Guardian, we do not use AI Tools to substantially assist or replace human judgment or discretionary decision making in our hiring process. All hiring decisions will be made by Guardian colleagues.
• Additionally, at applicable times, Guardian will make public the most recent bias audit results for such AI tools, which may be found here.
• Current Guardian Colleagues: Please apply through the internal Jobs Hub in Workday.