{"id":2748824,"url":"https://alion.io/job/northwestern-mutual-innovation-engineer-technical-strategy","title":"Innovation Engineer, Technical Strategy","company":{"id":690951,"name":"Northwestern Mutual","domain":"northwesternmutual.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/northwesternmutual","size_band":"501-1000","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":null},"role":"Industrial Engineering","role_family":"Industrial Engineering","seniority":"senior","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["New York, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":136800,"max":205200,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":205200},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS Bedrock","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"Hallucination","optional":false},{"name":"Least Privilege","optional":false},{"name":"LLM Guardrails","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Structured Outputs","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"C#","optional":true},{"name":"C++","optional":true},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-16T23:24:30Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-10-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T16:38:53Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":4,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":4},"description":"This position will be based at our New York Campus and require a hybrid work environment: 2 days weekly onsite and 3 days weekly remote. \nWho we are\nVariable is the applied innovation team within Northwestern Mutual. Our mission is to experiment with emerging technologies and technical strategies to meaningfully influence our organization’s technology roadmaps and investments. We partner with teams from across the entire organization to bring emerging technology to forefront.\nWe are committed to fostering a diverse, equitable, and inclusive environment that nurtures innovation. Our team provides a stable yet dynamic platform for personal and professional growth, allowing individuals to drive meaningful change throughout our organization.\nAbout the Role\nWe are hiring a senior engineer to lead technical strategy work and to build the proofs of concept that give that strategy its evidence. The role sits between engineering, architecture, and the business. In a typical quarter you will shape the architecture for a new class of system, get architects, risk partners, and product owners aligned on a path none of them owns alone, write the recommendation that goes to senior leadership, and build enough of the system to show that the recommendation holds.\nThe work today centers on AI systems in regulated environments: agentic workflows and automations; the API, authorization, and fraud controls that make them safe; evaluation of systems whose outputs are non-deterministic; and the governance that lets them run in production. You will work with vendor platforms as often as with code we write ourselves, and much of the job is discovering what enterprise systems can actually do and what it would take to change them.\nYou have led, or owned a major workstream in, technical transformation programs inside a large, regulated organization. You know how enterprise systems, controls, and decision rights work, and you can still open an editor and have something working in days. You write clearly and persuasively, because most of your work will lean on influence and will travel as documents.\nWhat You'll Do\nDevelop technical strategy for the enterprise's highest-uncertainty technology questions: what to build, what to buy, what to wait on, and what has to be true for each path to work.\nDesign reference architectures for new classes of systems, with particular attention to authorization, data access, audibility, and failure modes in a regulated environment.\nDemonstrate business value, feasibility, and scale in every recommendation, and say plainly when an idea should stop.\nBuild coalitions across enterprise architecture, risk, fraud, information security, legal, product, and operations. Write the decision documents that let those groups agree, run the working sessions, and carry disagreement without stalling the work.\nScope proofs of concept as hypotheses with a success measure and a stopping rule, then build them: working software against real enterprise systems and vendor platforms, built to answer a specific question and then handed off or retired.\nLead the enterprise's approach to evaluating and enabling non-deterministic systems: test sets, assertion-based scoring, model-graded evaluation calibrated against human judgment, and the monitoring that follows a system into production.\nEvaluate vendor platforms and make build, buy, or partner recommendations backed by evidence and fitted to the enterprise's constraints.\nMaintain gap registers and readiness assessments that tell leadership what stands between a proof of concept and production, with a short-term and a long-term option for each gap.\nPresent findings and recommendations to senior leadership in writing and in short sessions, and hand completed work to the teams that will own it.\nWork daily with AI coding agents. Set up the repositories, tests, and harnesses that let them produce reliable work, and review what they produce critically.\nWhat You'll Bring to the Role\n7+ years in software engineering, including inside a large, regulated organization.\nSystems and integration architecture as your core expertise: APIs, identity and authorization, systems of record, integration patterns, and the vendor platforms that sit between them.\nShipped applications on large language model APIs, including tool use, structured outputs, retrieval, and multi-step agents, with working knowledge of how these systems fail (hallucination, prompt injection, tool misuse, drift) and how to measure them.\nExperience designing evaluation for AI systems, and enough statistics to read the results honestly.\nProduction experience in Python and TypeScript, with the range to build a service, an integration, and a usable interface without waiting on anyone.\nCloud infrastructure inside enterprise guardrails: identity, secrets, network constraints, infrastructure as code, and model access through managed services such as AWS Bedrock or Azure OpenAI.\nIntegration of third-party platforms and SDKs, including exposing enterprise capabilities to agents through tool interfaces (MCP servers or equivalent) with least privilege.\nSecurity and privacy judgment for AI in financial services: handling of client data, least privilege for autonomous systems, auditability, and model risk.\nFluency with AI coding tools as a daily working method, and the judgment to know when their output is wrong.\nClear writing. You can turn a complicated technical situation into a two-page recommendation a senior leader can decide on.\nA record of aligning stakeholders who do not report to you, in an organization where no single person owns the decision.\nWe work with: Python, TypeScript, AWS, Terraform, and frontier model APIs accessed through enterprise-managed services. We also dive deep into third-party platforms. We test, learn, share, and repeat.\nPreferred Qualifications\nExperience playing key roles in problem definition, architecture, creating organizational alignment, and delivering a working result.\nA record of finding an opportunity no one assigned you, making the business case, and delivering it.\nExperience carrying a proof of concept into a production pilot owned by another team, on custom-built and vendor platforms alike, including the readiness, control, and handoff work it required.\nInsurance, wealth management, or financial planning domain knowledge, including advisor-facing tools.\nAI governance and model risk management: continuous monitoring, drift detection, authorization models for autonomous systems, and the documentation auditors and regulators expect.\nTime in an architecture, strategy, or platform function at a large company, where your output was a implementable strategy.\nExperience codifying business processes or institutional knowledge for automation.\nA short account of an endeavor that failed and your assessment as to why and what you learned.\nSkills You'll Have\nCross-Functional Collaboration: Partnering with product, business, architecture, infrastructure, security, and quality teams.\nTechnical Leadership: Guiding technical decisions, mentoring engineers, and improving engineering practices.\nSoftware Architecture: Contributing to the high-level structure, design patterns, integrations, and technical standards of a software system.\nSoftware Engineering: Applying engineering principles and development practices to design, build, test, deploy, and maintain reliable software.\nProgramming Language Expertise: Hands-on proficiency in the languages required by the team, such as Java, C#, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, C++, or Go.\nApplication Development: Designing, developing, testing, and maintaining applications that meet business and user needs.\nSystems Integration: Connecting internal or third-party applications, services, APIs, databases, and platforms.\nCompensation Range:\nPay Range - Start:\n$136,800.00Pay Range - End:\n$205,200.00Geographic Specific Pay Structure:\nStructure 110:\nStructure 115:\nWe believe in fairness and transparency. It’s why we share the salary range for most of our roles. However, final salaries are based on a number of factors, including the skills and experience of the candidate; the current market; location of the candidate; and other factors uncovered in the hiring process. The standard pay structure is listed but if you’re living in California, New York City or other eligible location, geographic specific pay structures, compensation and benefits could be applicable, click here to learn more.\nGrow your career with a best-in-class company that puts our clients' interests at the center of all we do. Get started now!\nNorthwestern Mutual is an equal opportunity employer that welcomes talented individuals of all backgrounds. We are committed to creating and maintaining an environment in which each employee can contribute creative ideas, seek challenges, assume leadership and continue to focus on meeting and exceeding business and personal objectives.","description_format":"text","description_chars":8924,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Hybrid work"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Financial Services","Wealth Management & Financial Advisors","Life Insurance & Annuities"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-16T23:24:30Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":90,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.903,"p_room":1,"age_days":4,"expected_fill_days":37,"reasons":["conf:13","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-21T05:46:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":205200,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/northwestern-mutual-innovation-engineer-technical-strategy","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/northwestern-mutual-innovation-engineer-technical-strategy.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-21T13:09:08Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":18610,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-22T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":690951},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=690951"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fnorthwestern-mutual-innovation-engineer-technical-strategy"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fnorthwestern-mutual-innovation-engineer-technical-strategy"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fnorthwestern-mutual-innovation-engineer-technical-strategy"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/northwestern-mutual-innovation-engineer-technical-strategy\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fnorthwestern-mutual-innovation-engineer-technical-strategy"}]}