AI Senior Engineer

AI Senior Engineer

Place of work: Cracow

Job purpose:

Are you a motivated, hands-on, and innovative person, interested in working for one of the largest global insurers? Are you obsessed with developing great AI/LLM-powered analytics software, which helps addressing daily business challenges of one of the biggest global insurers? Then this job is something for you.

We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist with strong engineering skills to join the global Commercial Insurance team. In this role, you will:

• Solve high impact business problems with a particular focus on Underwriting, for example: understanding claims drivers, portfolio optimization or improving our risk selection,
• Learn how Commercial Insurance works at its core, including dedicated training,
• Be part of a fast-paced entrepreneurially minded global team, which is daring to challenge the status quo,
• Developing and driving adoption of our main global Underwriting analytical product suite,
• Excelling on your technical skills by working with internal and external experts.

Responsibilities:

• Working on high impact projects with end-to-end responsibility for their success
• Evaluating and applying the right cloud and foundation model capabilities (e.g., Azure OpenAI and open-source models) to solve specific business problems, including RAG, tool-use/agents, and orchestration
• Generating insights from internal and external data sources, using a wide range of tools and methodologies, e.g., from building robust big data pipelines in Spark/Databricks to applying LLMs, retrieval, embeddings, and classical ML/statistics, and extending our front-end applications
• Building applications loved by internal and external users: from implementing proof of concepts to full-scale solutions; from portfolio management applications used by senior Zurich executives to API services embedded into the core Underwriting processes
• Making sure our platform expands and runs reliably in Production: build or help build AI models, add new and further optimize existing data pipelines, expand our automation architecture (e.g., web scrapers, automated user alerts)
• Coordinating directly with product managers and application users globally (with particular focus on adoption)
• Mentoring and developing more junior team members on all matters above

Candidate’s profile:

• Technically strong:
  • Has professional experience across data science and data engineering (shipping production grade analytics/AI applications)
  • Hands-on experience building LLM applications (e.g., prompt design, retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, vector stores, evaluation & guardrails, cost/performance tuning) and willingness to engineer the full stack to get them into production
  • Familiarity with agentic patterns (tool use, planning, function calling, document workflows) and LLM orchestration frameworks
  • Solid statistical foundations (e.g. regression, time series, uncertainty estimation)
  • Any Dataframe API (like Spark or Pandas) and SQL
  • Query optimizations (RDBMS or Spark) and indexing
  • Strong Python (production-grade). Java and/or Scala are a plus; functional programming experience is a plus
  • Knowledge of scripting languages, such as Python, R, bash
  • Experience working on all stages of the software development lifecycle
• Can-do attitude, with a clear focus on the end-product and user experience and the specific business use case
• Passion to tackle real business problems and persistence to follow through with your recommendations
• Good team player and communicator
• Excellent written and spoken English, other European languages are a plus

Preferred skills/experience:

• Experience with cloud-based technology and solution design: e.g., experience with Microsoft Azure Products, Databricks, Kubernetes, Docker
• Front-end development experience is a strong plus
• Experience in designing, running, and expanding AI models (in particular, text classification, entity extraction, clustering & topic modeling) in production; with a main focus on Natural Language processing
• Experience with web scraping, e.g., Selenium/Playwright

We offer:

• Real life opportunities to develop and grow with us and contribute to the world around us
• Competitive salaries, language allowance and an employee benefits package that includes among others medical insurance, life insurance and sport-card
• Annual bonus depending on company annual results and individual performance
• Wide range of learning programs and personal development opportunities including also possibility to apply for up to 80% of educational trainings reimbursement
• Referral awards
• Online fitness trainings
• Hybrid work
• Nice and friendly atmosphere

Who we are:

Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) is a leading multi-line insurer serving people and businesses in more than 200 countries and territories. Founded 150 years ago, Zurich is transforming insurance. In addition to providing insurance protection, Zurich is increasingly offering prevention services such as those that promote wellbeing and enhance climate resilience. Reflecting its purpose to ‘create a brighter future together’, Zurich aspires to be one of the most responsible and impactful businesses in the world. It is targeting net-zero emissions by 2050 and has the highest-possible ESG rating from MSCI. In 2020, Zurich launched the Zurich Forest project to support reforestation and biodiversity restoration in Brazil. The Group has about 60,000 employees and is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. Zurich Insurance Group Ltd (ZURN), is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange and has a level I American Depositary Receipt (ZURVY) program, which is traded over-the-counter on OTCQX. Further information is available at www.zurich.com.

In March 2016 we established a Shared Service Centre in Kraków, in Poland to support our global strategy. It is from this location that we have created a global shared service platform, focusing on advanced business functions such as financial accounting and reporting, planning and performance management, ICFR testing, financial systems management as well as HR integrated talent management operations.

This role is related to the key area of Zurich’s activity in Kraków. We are committed to complete the recruitment process as soon as possible, however in some occasions it may take up to 6 months and the requirements for the position may be subject to some clarification or modification during the recruitment process.