AI ML Engineer Visa Sponsorship Jobs in Tennessee

INTRODUCTION

When you join the team at Unum, you become part of an organization committed to helping you thrive. Here, we work to provide the employee benefits and service solutions that enable employees at our client companies to thrive throughout life’s moments. And this starts with ensuring that every one of our team members enjoys opportunities to succeed both professionally and personally. To enable this, we provide:

• Award-winning culture
• Inclusion and diversity as a priority
• Performance Based Incentive Plans
• Competitive benefits package that includes: Health, Vision, Dental, Short & Long-Term Disability
• Generous PTO (including paid time to volunteer!)
• Up to 9.5% 401(k) employer contribution
• Mental health support
• Career advancement opportunities
• Student loan repayment options
• Tuition reimbursement
• Flexible work environments

All the benefits listed above are subject to the terms of their individual Plans.

And that’s just the beginning… With 10,000 employees helping more than 39 million people worldwide, every role at Unum is meaningful and impacts the lives of our customers. Whether you’re directly supporting a growing family, or developing online tools to help navigate a difficult loss, customers are counting on the combined talents of our entire team. Help us help others, and join Team Unum today!

GENERAL SUMMARY:

Unum Group seeks Directors, AI/ML Transformation in Chattanooga, TN.

Applicants who are interested in this position may apply at www.jobpostingtoday.com (Ref #18817) for consideration.

ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Lead AI/ML Strategy and Roadmap – Define and oversee the strategic direction for AI/ML transformation initiatives, aligning model development and deployment with overall business goals.
• Design and Develop Advanced Models – Architect, train, and validate machine learning and generative AI models (including supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning approaches) to solve complex business problems.
• Implement and Operationalize AI Solutions – Translate model outputs into production-ready digital products, ensuring scalability, robustness, and integration with existing enterprise systems.
• Model Governance and Risk Management – Establish and enforce responsible AI practices including explainability, fairness, bias detection, security, and regulatory compliance throughout the AI lifecycle.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – Partner with product managers, engineers, data scientists, and business leaders to identify high-value use cases and drive adoption of AI/ML capabilities.
• Performance Monitoring and Continuous Improvement – Implement monitoring frameworks to track accuracy, drift, and performance of deployed models, ensuring timely retraining and updates.
• Team Leadership and Talent Development – Mentor and guide data science and engineering teams, fostering a culture of innovation, experimentation, and best practices in AI/ML.
• Stakeholder Communication – Present technical concepts and business impact of AI/ML initiatives to executive leadership, external partners, and non-technical audiences in a clear and compelling way.
• Innovation and Research – Stay current on emerging AI/ML methodologies, tools, and industry trends; pilot new technologies such as large language models and generative AI to maintain a competitive edge.

BASIC QUALIFICATIONS

Requires a Bachelor’s degree in AI/ML, Data Science or related analytical field plus 5 years of related experience. Alternatively, employer will accept a Master’s degree in AI/ML, Data Science or related analytical field plus 3 years of related experience. Requires 5 years of experience with a Bachelor’s degree, or 3 years with a Master’s degree, with the following:

• Statistics, calculus, and algorithm-based mathematics; building generalized linear models, and processing/analyzing time series data
• Coding abilities with an emphasis on Python and understanding many ML/AI based Python libraries, including Scikit-Learn, NumPy, pandas, and OpenCV
• Deep-learning (neural network) model building, training, and deployment, with PyTorch or Tensorflow
• Other forms of supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and optimization algorithms; experience with building gradient boosted tree models (LightGBM or XGBoost)
• DevOps and the ownership of a model’s lifecycle, including experimentation, deployment, monitoring of feature drift and inference performance, model evaluation, and model iteration
• Feature engineering for model performance improvement and data leakage prevention
• Working with healthcare-related claims data
• Version control of code, with a git-based code version control and repository system

Requires 4 years of experience with a Bachelor’s degree, or 2 years of experience with a Master’s degree, with the following:

• AI/ML cloud platforms (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure) and leveraging one or more of these platforms to deploy AI solutions
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in Python; experience with document processing, handwriting recognition, and document classification
• Querying relational databases (SQL) and non-relational databases (MongoDB) from a Python environment

Requires 2 years of experience with a Bachelor’s degree, or any amount of experience with a Master’s degree with the following:

• Generative AI/large language model applications; must be able to run off-the-shelf open-source LLMs and call commercial LLM APIs in a Python environment
• Fine-tuning LLMs/VLMs using PEFT (LoRA/QLoRA), plus quantization (4/8-bit, AWQ/GPTQ) for efficient, scalable inference
• Experience with data prep, evaluation, and deployment (Hugging Face or vLLM)

LOCATION

Chattanooga, TN

WORK ARRANGEMENT

100% telecommuting permitted. 25% domestic travel to company events.

COMPENSATION

• Salary Range: $170,000 - $210,000 per year. This wage range supersedes the base salary range listed below, due to the salary range below reflecting a national range.

The base salary range for applicants for this position is listed below. Unless actual salary is indicated above in the job description, actual pay will be based on skill, geographical location and experience.

$109,100.00-$224,000.00

Additionally, Unum offers a portfolio of benefits and rewards that are competitive and comprehensive including healthcare benefits (health, vision, dental), insurance benefits (short & long-term disability), performance-based incentive plans, paid time off, and a 401(k) retirement plan with an employer match up to 5% and an additional 4.5% contribution whether you contribute to the plan or not. All benefits are subject to the terms and conditions of individual Plans.

Unum and Colonial Life are part of Unum Group, a Fortune 500 company and leading provider of employee benefits to companies worldwide. Headquartered in Chattanooga, TN, with international offices in Ireland, Poland and the UK, Unum also has significant operations in Portland, ME, and Baton Rouge, LA - plus over 35 US field offices. Colonial Life is headquartered in Columbia, SC, with over 40 field offices nationwide.

Unum is an equal opportunity employer, considering all qualified applicants and employees for hiring, placement, and advancement, without regard to a person's race, color, religion, national origin, age, genetic information, military status, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, or protected veteran status.