Innovation Engineer, Technical Strategy

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.

Variable 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. We 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.

We 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. The 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. You 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.

Develop 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. Design reference architectures for new classes of systems, with particular attention to authorization, data access, audibility, and failure modes in a regulated environment. Demonstrate business value, feasibility, and scale in every recommendation, and say plainly when an idea should stop. Build 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. Scope 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. Lead 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. Evaluate vendor platforms and make build, buy, or partner recommendations backed by evidence and fitted to the enterprise's constraints. Maintain 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. Present findings and recommendations to senior leadership in writing and in short sessions, and hand completed work to the teams that will own it. Work daily with AI coding agents. Set up the repositories, tests, and harnesses that let them produce reliable work, and review what they produce critically. What You'll Bring to the Role 7+ years in software