Principal AI Scientist

Palomar is a specialty insurer hiring a Principal AI Scientist to shape and build its enterprise AI platform, establish standards for evaluation and safe use, and enable employees to develop AI solutions. The role also advances applied AI, predictive modeling, and decision support in partnership with business leaders.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical direction and operation of our enterprise AI platform: models, permissions, connectors, reliability and cost
• Build a governed marketplace of reusable skills and plugins that any employee can contribute to or use within their own permissions
• Turn Palomar’s procedures and expert know-how into version-controlled context that agents use reliably, connected to trusted data and core systems
• Set evaluation and release standards: test cases, acceptance criteria, an accountable owner and monitoring for everything that ships
• Advise AI leadership on which tools to build, buy, improve or retire
• Lead enablement through training, office hours and review of employee-built solutions, and develop internal owners for what gets built
• Work with business experts to capture judgment and exceptions, and turn what works into tested, reusable capabilities
• Shape the applied AI agenda with business leaders, prioritizing by value, feasibility, data readiness and risk
• Develop, validate and deploy predictive models and decision support for problems from prioritization and routing to portfolio and distribution, choosing statistical, machine learning or LLM methods as the problem requires, with clear boundaries for automation and human review
• Measure decision quality and business impact against real baselines, monitor what ships, and work with Risk and Compliance to keep it within Palomar’s AI policies