Director, AI Vendor Integrations & Standards

Position Purpose: Leads Centene's vendor AI review and integration standards function, accountable for ensuring that third-party and vendor-supplied AI capability entering the enterprise is properly assessed, architecturally suitable for Centene's AI Control Plane, and held to defined integration and interoperability standards over the life of the relationship. Directs vendor AI intake review and technical assessment in coordination with AI Intake, Enterprise AI Governance, Security Risk Management/TPRM, Procurement, and Legal, ensuring AI functionality is disclosed, evaluated, and routed through the required review paths before contract execution or deployment. Determines and documents each vendor solution's suitability to the AI Control Plane across the defined integration points — intake assessment, control adherence, vendor agents running on Centene's agentic framework, vendor agents interacting with LLMs through the Centene AI Gateway, and network-level AI observability. Ensures compliance with Centene's standards for vendor AI integration, including open-standard and protocol expectations such as MCP, model routing and gateway use, telemetry and observability schemas, agent registration, and cost attribution. Owns ongoing vendor AI control plane adherence — monitoring conformance, managing model-change notification, and driving remediation when vendor solutions drift from approved patterns. Leads a team and serves as the enterprise's AI voice in vendor AI evaluations, bake-offs, relationship management, and contract negotiations. Key Details: Centene is going through our biggest transformation in our history to become the market leader, and AI is the key tool to enable the transformation. This is an exciting opportunity to use AI to transform a Fortune 20 company, and to change healthcare for the better! This is a remote role within the United States, requiring business travel 2-3 times per quarter. Candidates must be authorized to work in the U.S. without the need for employment-based visa sponsorship now or in the future. Sponsorship and future sponsorship are not available for this opportunity, including employment-based visa types H-1B, L-1, O-1, H-1B1, F-1, J-1, OPT, or CPT. Provides leadership and management oversight for vendor AI assessment, integration architecture, and standards conformance across the enterprise AI portfolio. Defines the evaluation methodology and standards, leads the team performing assessments, partners across governance and risk functions, and is accountable for the technical suitability, interoperability, and ongoing control adherence of vendor-supplied AI at Centene. Leads intake review and assessment of vendor AI solutions, including new vendor AI, AI functionality being activated within existing vendor platforms, and scope changes to current vendor offerings — coordinating with AI Intake and Security Risk Management so the third-party intake and vendor risk assessment are engaged at the right point. Administers the vendor AI due diligence process, including the Vendor AI Questionnaires covering model identification, agentic behavior, AI lifecycle governance, testing and evaluation for accuracy and bias, data use and training, lineage, orchestration and data flow, retention, subprocessor chains, PHI/PII handling, MCP server inventory, and incident response. Determines and documents each vendor solution's suitability to Centene's AI Control Plane, selecting and validating the applicable integration pattern — agents on Centene's agentic framework, vendor-hosted agents routing model calls through the Centene AI Gateway, network-level observability, or a combination — and identifying gaps requiring remediation or exception. Assures compliance with Centene's vendor AI integration and interoperability standards, including open-standard and protocol expectations (MCP, open APIs), model routing, prompt and agent versioning and change approval, telemetry and trace sch…

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