Full-Time
AI Platform Engineer
MassMutual Ascend
201-500 employees
Provides transparent annuities for retirement planning
Compensation Overview
$163.9k - $215k/yr
Boston, MA, USA + 2 more
More locations: Springfield, MA, USA | New York, NY, USA
Hybrid
Hybrid office work is required.
 DevOps & Infrastructure (1) |
|---|
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- At least 5 years of experience in platform, infrastructure, or site reliability engineering, with a track record as a technical lead or staff-level individual contributor with team-wide technical scope.
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Certified Kubernetes Application Developer, or equivalent AWS certification.
- At least 3 years of experience in cloud-native architecture, including Kubernetes at scale, managed cloud services, networking, identity federation, and multi-tenancy patterns across Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure.
- At least 3 years of proven ownership of complex, multi-month platform initiatives driven from whiteboard to production while managing ambiguity and technical risk.
- Define architectural direction at the AI platform component level across cloud infrastructure, AI serving layers, developer tooling, and reliability strategy, and translate it into a concrete, prioritized roadmap.
- Lead design on critical platform components such as the large language model gateway, multi-tenant compute isolation, model serving infrastructure, and enterprise integration patterns, and write architecture decision records that become engineering standards.
- Serve as the first point of technical escalation for difficult engineering decisions, run design reviews, provide deep technical feedback on pull requests, and pair with engineers on complex problems.
- Own the technical execution of major platform initiatives end to end, including scoping, sequencing work, managing technical risk, and driving initiatives to production without losing quality.
- Lead platform reliability strategy by defining service-level objectives, shaping the observability strategy, leading incident reviews, and improving platform stability and operational maturity.
- Lead the technical design of governance and compliance controls for data residency, access management, audit logging, and AI usage policies to satisfy enterprise customer requirements and compliance frameworks.
- Drive cross-team alignment with AI engineering, product, and cloud engineering teams; communicate technical trade-offs clearly; and represent platform capabilities to senior stakeholders.
- Raise the technical craft of the team through thorough design reviews, documentation habits, and hands-on pairing without managing anyone directly.
- Strong infrastructure as code and GitOps fluency with Terraform or Pulumi and ArgoCD, including experience standardizing platform tooling and deployment patterns across engineering teams.
- Hands-on experience with AI/ML infrastructure, including model serving, inference pipelines, GPU resource management, or large language model integration patterns.
- Experience mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across teams.
- Strong written communication, including clear design documents, useful architecture decision records, and the ability to explain architectural decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Experience with large language model serving at scale using vLLM, Triton, Ray Serve, or AI gateway design patterns.
- Experience building an internal developer platform from scratch with a product mindset focused on internal developer experience.
- Strong understanding of AI safety, model evaluation, and governance frameworks.
- Ability to lead through technical credibility by influencing design decisions, driving alignment, and raising quality without formal authority.
- Experience with FinOps or GPU cost optimization across large inference workloads.
- Open-source contributions to platform or machine-learning infrastructure tooling.
- Comfort working in ambiguous problem spaces and building clarity and shared context.
MassMutual Ascend provides annuities and related life insurance products through its MassMutual Ascend Life Insurance Company. Its annuities—made to be transparent and easier to understand—help people plan their financial future with clear expectations. The company issues products directly and offers registered index-linked annuities distributed by MM Ascend Life Investor Services, LLC, an affiliate. What sets MassMutual Ascend apart is its emphasis on clarity, client-focused service, and ongoing improvement beyond the status quo, backed by MassMutual’s claims-paying ability. Its goal is to help customers navigate their financial future with confidence by offering straightforward, reliable retirement and protection solutions through a network of affiliated issuers and distributors.
Company Size
201-500
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
N/A
Headquarters
Cincinnati, Ohio
Founded
1976
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- June 2026 launched the Income Ascender rider, adding guaranteed income to fixed-indexed annuities.
- August 2026 LIMRA ranked Ascend top in advisory fixed-indexed annuity sales for eight quarters.
- Nearly $900 million of sales came in 2025 and 2026, proving accelerating demand.
What critics are saying
- July 2026 MassMutual cut about 50 broker-dealer jobs, weakening distribution support.
- RIA adoption still depends on 1,700 representatives across nearly 1,000 RIAs.
- Fee-only advisors can replace annuities with cheaper portfolios, capping existential channel expansion.
What makes MassMutual Ascend unique
- August 2026: MassMutual Ascend crossed $2 billion in lifetime advisory annuity sales.
- It launched the first advisory fixed-indexed annuity in 2016 for RIA fee models.
- Parent-backed Cincinnati platform spans fixed, fixed-indexed, and registered index-linked annuities.
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Benefits
Flexible Work Hours
Hybrid Work Options
Remote Work Options
Company News
MassMutual Ascend tops $2 billion in RIA annuity sales as advisors warm to income products. Ten years after entering the fee-based annuity market, MassMutual Ascend says nearly half its lifetime sales came in the past two years alone - but barriers remain among fee-only advisors. AUG 13, 2026 MassMutual Ascend, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mass Mutual wth a focus on the RIA channel, is celebrating a milestone in the growing adoption of advisory annuities. MassMutual Ascend has crossed $2 billion in lifetime advisory annuity sales, a threshold the insurer says reflects a broader shift in how registered investment advisors think about guaranteed income inside client portfolios. The Cincinnati-based insurer said the figure was built on relationships with more than 1,700 investment advisor representatives across nearly 1,000 RIAs that now write annuity business through the platform. What stands out in the numbers, the company said, is the pace of adoption in the past two years, with roughly $900 million of its advisory annuity sales coming through the door in 2025 and 2026. "Ten years ago, we entered this space with the belief that annuities would become an increasingly important part of advisors' retirement planning conversations," Joe Maringer, senior vice president and national sales manager at MassMutual Ascend, said in a statement. "This milestone is evidence of that momentum." MassMutual Ascend traces the milestone back to 2016, when it launched what it describes as the industry's first advisory fixed-indexed annuity - a product built specifically for advisors operating under a fee-based, rather than commission-based, model. Since then, the company has broadened its advisory lineup to include fixed, fixed-indexed and registered index-linked annuities, chasing a fiduciary channel that has historically been resistant to insurance products. MassMutual Ascend has also been ranked by LIMRA as the top provider in advisory fixed-indexed annuity sales for eight consecutive quarters, the company said. The case for annuities inside a fee-based practice rests on the fact that a dollar allocated to an annuity can be structured to generate more guaranteed lifetime income than a dollar in a comparable fixed-income allocation; that comes down mostly to how risk pooling happens across a large group of policyholders. Mammoth asset managers like BlackRock and State Street have taken notice over the past few years, placing annuities into the target-date products that end up on the menus made available to countless retirement plan participants. "When these asset managers are acknowledging that fact and bringing annuities in for income and in their own products, that has to speak to the individual advisors and firms who think they can do it themselves," David Lau, founder and CEO of DPL Financial, previously told InvestmentNews. Belle Bielawska, national key account manager at MassMutual Ascend, framed the trend as a shift in how advisors and clients view the category altogether. "As retirement challenges become more complex, we're seeing greater appreciation for the role modern annuities can play and the unique outcomes they're designed to deliver, like defined protection and contractual income, which can be difficult to replicate elsewhere," Bielawska said in a written statement. Despite the RIA channel's prospects as the next growth frontier for annuities, there are still real challenges holding them back. Aside from implementaton bottlenecks and the historical gap in fee-based options, the complexity of annuties has also kept a lid on how comfortable advisors can get recommending them. For fiduciary advisors, it may also be easier to justify other low-cost options when considering their clients' best interest. Matt Clifford, a former Pacific Life annuities strategy leader who now consults for insurance and annuity organizations, also sees a mismatch between how carriers design and roll out new annuity products, and how RIAs approach planning for clients. "Carriers frequently adjust product design and sales capacity to align with shifting economic conditions, capital markets, and internal risk or return objectives," Clifford said in a LinkedIn note. "Over the past two decades, this has driven notable shifts in product focus." In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, he said low interest rates and rampant market volatility, along with more stringent capital reserve requirements for financial institutions, pushed carriers to pivot from variable annuities with guaranteed living benefits to more capital-efficient fixed products. "As interest rates rose sharply in 2022 and 2023, carriers leaned into multi-year guaranteed annuities (MYGAs) and fixed indexed annuities (FIAs), which offered competitive yields, strong consumer appeal, and more favorable spread economics," he said. "These shifts, while operationally sound, create downstream friction as advisors and wholesalers must reorient their positioning, retrain, and reshape client conversations." While firms operating in the brokerage model may be able to manage those frictions thanks to incentives such as commssions and marketing support, Clfford argued those buttons aren't available to RIAs, who "tend to take a longer-term, more stable view of portfolio construction and client strategy. "To close that gap, carriers should work to identify and deeply understand the core financial planning principles RIAs manage to, and build a set of stable, fitting solutions that align with those principles," he said. "Just as important, they must demonstrate a willingness to stand behind those solutions across changing macro and market environments."
MassMutual announced today the completion of the acquisition of American Financial Group, Inc.'s wholly owned subsidiary, Great American Life Insurance Company.