Lead AI/ML Engineer

Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The work you do with our team will directly improve health outcomes by connecting people with the care, pharmacy benefits, data and resources they need to feel their best. Here, you will find a culture guided by inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health optimization on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together. We're looking for a hands-on technical leader to design, build, and productionize AI/ML and GenAI solutions that improve healthcare operations and patient outcomes. You will own end-to-end delivery-from problem framing and data pipelines to models, MLOps/LLMOps, and ongoing monitoring-while mentoring a small team and partnering with product, data engineering, and clinical/operations stakeholders. Primary Responsibilities: • Lead architecture and delivery of ML/GenAI solutions (classification, forecasting, NLP, deep learning, LLM apps) at production scale • Build robust data/feature pipelines over large clinical/claims datasets; write efficient, well-tested Python (pandas/NumPy) and SQL • Develop and deploy LLM capabilities: prompt design, fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, vector indexing, and evaluation with guardrails • Establish MLOps/LLMOps best practices: CI/CD, model registry, experiment tracking, monitoring, drift detection, A/B testing, cost/perf optimization • Ensure data privacy and compliance (HIPAA/PHI handling, access controls, auditability) and champion model governance and Responsible AI • Translate business problems into technical roadmaps; communicate trade-offs and results to executives and non-technical partners • Mentor engineers and set engineering standards (code reviews, documentation, reliability, observability) • Lead architecture and delivery of ML/GenAI solutions (classification, forecasting, NLP, deep learning, LLM apps) at production scale • Build robust data/feature pipelines over large clinical/claims datasets; write efficient, well-tested Python (pandas/NumPy) and SQL • Develop and deploy LLM capabilities: prompt design, fine-tuning, RAG pipelines, vector indexing, and evaluation with guardrails • Establish MLOps/LLMOps best practices: CI/CD, model registry, experiment tracking, monitoring, drift detection, A/B testing, cost/perf optimization • Ensure data privacy and compliance (HIPAA/PHI handling, access controls, auditability) and champion model governance and Responsible AI • Translate business problems into technical roadmaps; communicate trade-offs and results to executives and non-technical partners • Mentor engineers and set engineering standards (code reviews, documentation, reliability, observability) • Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so Required Qualifications: • Bachelors in Computer Science, Engineering, Math, or related field required; MS/PhD preferred or equivalent experience • 10+ years of professional experience in software/ML engineering, including 3+ years leading projects or teams • Hands-on GenAI experience: LLMs, embeddings, RAG, fine-tuning, evaluation; familiarity with Hugging Face and LangChain/LlamaIndex • Solid data engineering skills: SQL; experience with Spark/Dask and workflow orchestration (Airflow/Prefect) • Cloud proficiency (AWS/Azure/GCP) and containerization/orchestration (Docker/Kubernetes); CI/CD and IaC (Terraform) exposure • Proven solid foundation in statistics and ML (hypothesis testing, experimental design, feature engineering, supervised/unsupervised methods) • Proven deep learning expertise (PyTorch or TensorFlow) and modern NLP (transformers) • Expert Python and pandas stack; Proven ability to write vectorized, high-performance code; solid testing practices (pytest) and Git • Proven excellent communication and stakeholder management skills Preferred Qualifications: • Healthcare domain experience: claims, EHR/HL7/FHIR, coding (ICD/CPT), risk adjustment, quality measures, de-identification • Experience with Big data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery) and streaming (Kafka); lakehouse patterns • Experience with MLOps stack: MLflow/SageMaker/Azure ML/Vertex; model monitoring/observability • Security/compliance frameworks (SOC 2, HITRUST) experience • Experience with additional languages for performance or integration (Scala/Java/Go) • Vector databases (FAISS, Pinecone, pgvector), knowledge graphs (Neo4j), and ontologies (UMLS/SNOMED) At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone-of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income-deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes - an enterprise priority reflected in our mission. #NIC