{"id":34665,"url":"https://alion.io/job/the-cigna-group-lead-ai-architect","title":"Lead AI Architect","company":{"id":13928,"name":"The Cigna Group","domain":"thecignagroup.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/thecignagroup","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Workday","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":89,"open_postings":75,"ghost_share":0.027,"stale_share":0.533,"repost_share":0.053,"time_to_fill_p50_days":19,"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"}},"role":"AI/ML","role_family":"AI/ML","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Madrid, Spain","Glasgow, United Kingdom"],"countries":["ES","GB"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":66000,"max_usd":164000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_cell_scaled_by_country","sample_n":1286},"experience_years_min":10,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Azure","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Function Calling","optional":false},{"name":"LangChain","optional":false},{"name":"LangGraph","optional":false},{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Model Context Protocol","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":false},{"name":"NLP","optional":false},{"name":"OCR","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"RAG","optional":false},{"name":"Semantic Search","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-07-31T00:00:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-01","last_verified_at":"2026-10-27T10:10:27Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":88,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":88},"description":"About Cigna Healthcare\nCigna Healthcare is a global health service company dedicated to transforming healthcare. With roots in the U.S. and operations in over 30 countries, we serve more than 180 million customers and patients worldwide. Ranked 13th on the Fortune 500 in 2025, Cigna is recognized as one of the most trusted and influential names in the industry.\nOur mission is to improve the health, well-being, and peace of mind of those we serve.\nJoin our globally recognized brand, where trust, communication, and a positive culture are at the core of everything we do. Our leadership is consistent, approachable, and supportive-ensuring your well-being and work-life balance.\nWe're looking for individuals who thrive in collaborative environments, are passionate about meaningful change, and want to grow in a company that puts people first.\nAt Cigna, you'll be part of a purpose-driven team that values innovation, compassion, and impact. Whether you're shaping better care experiences or supporting customers through life's key moments, your work will matter.\nGrow with us-and help shape the future of healthcare.\nPurpose of this Role\nThe Lead AI Architect (AI) is responsible for defining, adopting, and assuring AI-enabled data architectures that are commercially viable, technically robust, and aligned to Cigna’s enterprise and data strategy.\nAs part of the International Health Global Architecture function, this role sets architectural direction and ensures strategic priorities are realised through data and AI delivery.\nThis role will drive innovation, productivity and operational improvements, and customer experience transformation by applying modern AI architecture in a secure, scalable, and responsible manner. \nThis role collaborates closely with business leaders, product teams, engineering, and third-party partners to ensure data and AI investments deliver measurable value while meeting regulatory, operational, and security requirements.\nMain Duties / Responsibilities\nStrategy & Architecture Leadership\nArchitect and own enterprise-scale Generative AI platforms supporting multiple business use cases, including internal pilots, automation assistants, knowledge discovery, and customer-facing AI experiences.\nDefine and maintain reference target-state data and AI architectures for International Markets, aligned to enterprise architecture standards and data strategy.\nAct as a senior architectural authority for AI-enabled data solutions, ensuring consistency, reuse, and long-term sustainability across the landscape.\nAdvocate for AI-driven data design, embedding modern AI and analytics patterns into enterprise data platforms and services.\nMaintain an active awareness of emerging trends in data architecture, AI/ML, and enterprise technology, assessing their potential impact and value for Cigna, advising senior leadership on AI strategy, feasibility and adoption paths.\nAI Architecture\nDefine architectural patterns and standards to support AI model lifecycle management, AI and data pipelines, feature engineering, and associated design artefacts.\nArchitect and own enterprise-scale Generative AI platforms supporting multiple business use cases, including internal pilots, automation assistants, knowledge discovery, and customer-facing AI experiences. \nDefine and maintain reference architectures and design patterns for LLM-based applications, covering model access, orchestration, retrieval, prompt management, evaluation, and observability. \nEnsure that AI architectures support the needs of data science, analytics, and AI use cases, including scalability, performance, data quality, and governance.\nWork with Solution Architects and engineering teams to translate business and technical requirements into coherent end-to-end data and AI solution designs.\nDelivery & Governance\nParticipate across the full delivery lifecycle, from early concept shaping and investment cases through to design assurance and governance during build and implementation.\nProvide architecture governance through design reviews, standards definition, and participation in architecture review and approval forums.\nCapture and manage architectural risks, issues, and assumptions, articulating their financial, operational, and delivery impacts.\nSupport sponsors in the creation of well-rounded and compelling business cases for data and AI-led change.\nStakeholder & Commercial Leadership\nProactively engage with stakeholders across Business, IT, and third-party partners to ensure solutions are cost-effective, appropriate, and aligned to business outcomes.\nTake a lead role in the selection and assessment of third-party data and AI solutions, establishing and maintaining effective supplier and partner relationships where required.\nApply strong commercial awareness, including financial planning, budgeting, and cost-benefit considerations, in architectural decision-making.\nCapability Building & Mentoring\nProvide high-level mentoring and guidance to architects, design, and development teams to embed data and AI principles, standards, and best practices.\nTake a lead role in the selection and assessment of third-party data and AI solutions, establishing and maintaining effective supplier and partner relationships where required.\nContribute to the maturity of Cigna’s data and AI architecture capability through knowledge sharing, standards development, and continuous improvement.\nApply strong commercial awareness, including financial planning, budgeting, and cost-benefit considerations, in architectural decision-making.\nSkills & Experience\nEssential Experience\nDemonstrated expertise in architecting and leading large-scale AI initiatives, taking solutions from proof of concept through to successful production deployment.\nDeep understanding of architectural considerations and trade-offs in AI and machine learning projects, built through hands-on delivery experience.\nExperience working effectively within globally distributed teams and complex stakeholder environments.\nGenerative AI & Core Concepts:\nLarge Language Models (LLMs), embeddings, prompt engineering - Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Knowledge bases and Multimodal embeddings\nAgentic AI workflows and tool calling - Model Context Protocol (MCP) concepts and context management\nKnowledge on foundational models and inference profiles, regional hosting and restrictions of various models and be able to identify the right model for the right requirements.\nAI Architecture & Tooling\nAwareness of AI Gateway / model access layer design and access controls on the gateways.\nProficiency in designing and implementing AI Gateway/model access layers to facilitate secure and scalable access to AI models.\nExperience in architecting solutions with vector databases and semantic search for efficient retrieval of information from large volumes of unstructured data.\nSkilled in leveraging document intelligence platforms (e.g., Azure Form Recognizer, AWS Textract, Google Document AI) for document classification, data extraction, and entity recognition from varied formats including scanned documents, PDFs, and handwritten forms.\nKnowledge of Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solutions for automated ingestion, parsing, and validation of unstructured documents, ensuring accurate routing of documents to appropriate business workflows.\nFamiliarity with workflow orchestration frameworks (such as LangChain, LangGraph, or equivalent) to automate end-to-end document processing pipelines, including document routing, exception handling, and integration with downstream systems.\nUnderstanding of optical character recognition (OCR), natural language processing (NLP) techniques, and entity linking for extracting actionable insights from diverse data types.\nAwareness of data validation, quality checks, and document lifecycle management best practices to ensure compliance and reliability in document processing solutions.\nEnd-to-end AI pipelines: ingestion, retrieval, generation, evaluation and rollout.\nFamiliarity with AI governance, model lifecycle considerations, and responsible use of data and AI, particularly within regulated environments.\nQualifications\nAdvanced degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related field.\n10+ years of experience building and architecting large-scale software or AI systems in medium-to-large enterprises.\n5+ years of experience with AI/ML, NLP, or Generative AI\nExperience working in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments (e.g., healthcare, finance, insurance, global enterprises).\nStrong communication skills with the ability to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders, with English at C2 level.\nWhy You'll Love Working here\nCompetitive salary\n\nMulticultural and hybrid working environment\n\nPrivate Medical Insurance\n\nEmployee Wellbeing Benefits\n\nEducational Development Program\n\nAbout Cigna Healthcare\nCigna Healthcare, a division of The Cigna Group, is an advocate for better health through every stage of life. We guide our customers through the health care system, empowering them with the information and insight they need to make the best choices for improving their health and vitality. Join us in driving growth and improving lives.Qualified applicants will be considered without regard to race, color, age, disability, sex, childbirth (including pregnancy) or related medical conditions including but not limited to lactation, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran or military status, religion, national origin, ancestry, marital or familial status, genetic information, status with regard to public assistance, citizenship status or any other characteristic protected by applicable equal employment opportunity laws.\nIfyou require reasonable accommodation in completing the online application process, please email:  for support. Do not email  for an update on your application or to provide your resume as you will not receive a response.","description_format":"text","description_chars":10015,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":10,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[{"language":"English","level":"Proficiency (C2)","optional":false}]},"benefits":["Health insurance","Hybrid work"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Spain","iso":"ES","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Pharmacies","Health Insurance & Benefits"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-07-31T00:00:00Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":10,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.345,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":88,"expected_fill_days":19,"reasons":["conf:0","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-27T05:46:45Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/the-cigna-group-lead-ai-architect","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/the-cigna-group-lead-ai-architect.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-27T10:51:31Z","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":12706,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-28T00:00:00Z"}},"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":13928},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=13928"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fthe-cigna-group-lead-ai-architect"},{"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%2Fthe-cigna-group-lead-ai-architect"},{"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%2Fthe-cigna-group-lead-ai-architect"},{"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/the-cigna-group-lead-ai-architect\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fthe-cigna-group-lead-ai-architect"}]}