AI Engineer at Zenith Insurance Company in Woodland Hills, CA

Introduction:

Zenith is a team of Workers' Compensation Specialists committed to helping businesses succeed by protecting against the financial and human consequences of workplace injuries, providing for the needs of injured employees and making the workplace safer. To distinguish ourselves as the desired provider of Workers' Compensation Insurance, values such as collaboration, work-life balance, and integrity are placed at the center of all our operations. In addition, Zenith supports career advancement through a dedication to ongoing learning and development. An individual coming to Zenith will not only receive competitive compensation and a comprehensive benefits package, but continuous opportunities to grow as a professional.

Overview:

We are expanding our AI team as Zenith embarks on a major digital transformation. As part of our AI Center of Excellence, you'll work alongside industry-leading peers to build AI systems that have direct enterprise-wide impact – with access to the latest technology and a clear organizational commitment to getting it right. This is a ground-floor opportunity on a team and initiative that is just getting started.

 

Under general supervision, designs and builds production-grade AI systems for core business use cases. Develops LLM-powered applications, retrieval pipelines, and agentic workflows from design through deployment. Executes complete life cycle for moderately complex AI system components in collaboration with business, product, and data stakeholders.

Responsibilities:

• Understand assignments and work independently for extended periods on AI system design and implementation tasks.
• Design, build, and maintain LLM-powered applications for business workflows including risk summarization, document extraction, and decision-support tools.
• Architect and maintain RAG pipelines, vector stores, and retrieval systems grounded in enterprise data.
• Develop and orchestrate multi-step agentic systems using frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or custom toolchains.
• Define and run evaluation frameworks to measure output quality, reliability, and safety of AI systems in production, and instrument prompts, model calls, and system traces for observability and continuous improvement.
• Collaborate with subject matter experts to iterate on system behavior, feedback loops, and edge case handling.
• Work productively and harmoniously with others on a consistent basis. 
• Respond positively to direction and feedback on performance.
• Consistently maintain professional and appropriate demeanor.
• Perform other duties/projects as assigned.

Education:

• High School Diploma or equivalent combination of training/experience required
• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent combination of training/experience required
• Masters degree preferred

Work Experience:

• 3-5 years of related software engineering or data science experience with meaningful time building AI systems required.

Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities:

• Solid Python and SQL fundamentals; comfortable with API design (FastAPI/REST) and cloud deployments (Azure, AWS, GCP); expert IDE and notebook-based development.
• Hands-on experience building and deploying LLM applications in production (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or equivalent APIs).
• Proficiency with RAG architectures, vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, pgvector, Azure AI Search), vector search optimizations, and embedding workflows.
• Experience with agentic frameworks and tool-use/function-calling patterns (LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, or custom orchestration).
• Strong analytical and problem solving skills applied to complex, ambiguous AI system design challenges.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; ability to work across technical and non-technical teams, stakeholders, and decision makers.
• Team player, self-starter, motivated, problem solving mentality.
• Ability to focus and prioritize work requirements, strong strategic and tactical mindset.
• Stays current and evaluates latest emerging AI/ML technology for incorporation in AI solutions.
• Data science or machine learning background (scikit-learn, XGBoost, PyTorch) - Preferred.  
• Familiarity with insurance, underwriting, or financial services domains - Preferred.
• Familiarity with data platforms like Databricks or Snowflake - Preferred.
• Familiarity with ethical AI best practices, and AI and data regulatory fundamentals - Preferred.

Pay, Benefits, and Other Information:

The expected salary range for this position is $99,454 - $124,317. Actual pay will be adjusted based on experience, geographic location, and other job-related factors as permitted by law. Qualifications may warrant placement in a different job level.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental and Vision Insurance
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Paid Parental Leave
• Life, AD&D and Disability Insurance
• 401(k), Employee Share Purchase Plan (ESPP)
• Education and Training Reimbursement
• Paid Leave: 3 weeks/year Vacation, 2 weeks/year Sick Leave
• 10 paid Company Holidays, 2 Personal Days, 2 Floating Holidays
• Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• For more information, review details on the Benefits page of our Career Site: https://www.thezenith.com/careers/benefits/

Zenith typically posts jobs for a minimum of 8 to 14 calendar days. If you are interested in any of our open positions, we encourage you to submit your application promptly.

Zenith Insurance Company is an equal opportunity employer and considers all qualified applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, or any other legally protected characteristic. In compliance with California law, we are committed to fair hiring practices. Pursuant to the California Fair Chance Act (AB 1008), we will consider qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the law. Additionally, in accordance with the Los Angeles Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, we will not inquire about an applicant’s criminal history until after a conditional offer of employment has been made.

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran and need assistance accessing our career center or applying for a position due to your disability, you are entitled to request an accommodation. To make a request, please contact a Human resources representative at Zenith Insurance Company.

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