Job Title: Lead AI/ML Engineer
About the Optum AI Team
At Optum, we are transforming the future of health care through advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML). Our AI team is dedicated to developing scalable, responsible, and impactful solutions that improve health outcomes for millions.
Here is what defines our work:
- Impact at Scale: With access to vast health care data and cutting-edge infrastructure, our solutions drive measurable improvements across the health system — helping make care more effective, efficient, and accessible.
- Ground breaking Innovation: Our projects explore frontier areas of AI, including ML, NLP, LLMs, and Generative AI applied to both structured and unstructured data. We continuously evolve and push the boundaries of whats possible in applied AI.
- Collaboration with World-Class Experts: Our teams collaborate with leading universities and AI researchers, often developing novel techniques, publishing papers, and filing patents. Youll work alongside passionate innovators dedicated to real-world impact.
About United AI Studio (UAIS)
United AI Studio is an end-to-end AI/ML platform that empowers practitioners to build, deploy, manage, and scale AI applications responsibly across multi-cloud environments. The platform serves as a foundation for Optums AI initiatives, accelerating innovation across the enterprise.
Position Overview
We are seeking passionate AI/ML Engineers who can bridge the gap between state-of-the-art AI technology and practical business use cases. In this role, you will collaborate closely with customers to understand their AI/ML challenges, leverage UAISs multi-cloud capabilities, and design scalable, impactful solutions. You will also contribute to internal innovations that enhance the platforms performance and engineering workflows.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and deploy AI/ML solutions that address complex business challenges on the United AI Studio Enterprise Platform.
- Collaborate with users to understand data challenges, business needs, and AI/ML use cases.
- Recommend algorithms, tools, frameworks, and platform capabilities that best fit the problem.
- Create solution architectures, prototypes, and reference implementations.
- Decompose complex problems into clear, actionable solutions.
- Provide technical leadership and mentorship to both onshore and offshore teams, promoting collaboration and continuous improvement.
- Write robust, scalable, and high-performance code following best engineering practices.
- Stay updated on emerging AI/ML research, frameworks, and technologies, and introduce innovative ideas to the team.
- Maintain flexibility and adaptability to meet evolving team and project requirements.
- Adhere to company policies, procedures, and employment terms, including potential adjustments in role, location, or work environment based on business needs.
Required Qualifications
- Masters degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or related field; or Bachelors degree with at least 8 years of relevant experience.
- 5+ years of industry experience as a Data Scientist, AI/ML Engineer, or AI/ML Software Engineer, including 2+ years in a senior or lead role.
- Proficiency in Python with a solid understanding of data structures, software design, and performance optimization.
- 3+ years of experience deploying AI/ML solutions on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, Databricks, or Snowflake.
- Proven leadership experience mentoring teams and driving technical initiatives.
- Hands-on experience with containerization tools (Docker, Kubernetes) and distributed computing frameworks (e.g., Apache Spark).
- Proficiency with AI/ML frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, or Keras.
- Strong understanding of the end-to-end ML lifecycle — data preparation, model training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring.
- Excellent communication, collaboration, and customer-facing skills with a solutions-driven mindset.