Principal AI/ML Engineer

Optum AI is UnitedHealth Group’s enterprise AI team. We are AI/ML scientists and engineers with deep expertise in AI/ML engineering for health care. We develop AI/ML solutions for the highest impact opportunities across UnitedHealth Group businesses including UnitedHealthcare, Optum Financial, Optum Health, Optum Insight, and Optum Rx. In addition to transforming the health care journey through responsible AI/ML innovation, our charter also includes developing and supporting an enterprise AI/ML development platform.

Optum AI team members:

• Have impact at scale: We have the data and resources to make an impact at scale. When our solutions are deployed, they have the potential to make health care system work better for everyone.
• Do ground-breaking work: Many of our current projects involve cutting edge ML, NLP and LLM techniques. Generative AI methods for working with structured and unstructured health care data are continuously being developed and improved. We are working in one of the most important frontiers of AI/ML research and development.
• Partner with world-class experts on innovative solutions: Our team members are developing novel AI/ML solutions to business challenges. In some cases, this includes the opportunity to file patents and publish papers about the methods we develop. We also collaborate with AI/ML researchers at some of the world’s top universities.

You’ll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges. 

Primary Responsibilities:

• Develop novel machine learning models for prediction of health outcomes and improved care, engagement models, and other applications from both structured and unstructured data
• Develop and execute the vision for engineering platforms, and reusable code that will be used by thousands of other engineers for automation and improved efficiency of AI/ML development
• Stay up to date with latest technologies and literature recommending solutions to improve business goals
• Mentor data scientists, AI/ML scientists, and engineers to ensure the delivery of the AI/ML projects, and provide guidance on how to best use specific tools or technologies to achieve the desired results
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to determine applicability of AI to business problems
• Closely collaborate with the Responsible Use of AI (RUAI) team to ensure that the delivered solutions are compliant with the company policies and standards
• Write both internal and external documentation of the novel algorithms, including patents and publications in machine learning and other scientific conferences and journals as well and/or infrastructure design and deployment procedures
• Evangelize the benefits of the AI models and platforms built in our team to drive adoption for employees and functional roles across the UHG enterprise including technology, operations, marketing, legal, compliance, people team, internal infrastructure, and more

You’ll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

Required Qualifications:        

• Masters degree in Computer Science, Math, Statistics, or a related field and 10+ years experience OR a PhD in Computer Science or a related field and 5+ years experience
• 3+ years experience focused on AI/ML/NLP solutions delivery
• Hands-on experience implementing AI/ML and/or NLP solutions 
• Experience leading and implementing AI/ML projects from ideation to delivery, evaluation, and maintenance in production
• Experience in Python and AI/ML frameworks and tools (e.g., MLFlow, TensorFLow, PyTorch)
• Experience developing and deploying data pipelines, machine learning models, or applications on cloud platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, Databricks, AzureML)
• Experience with Gen AI solution pipelines (e.g., RAG) and Large Language Modeling and Transformer Architectures (e.g., BERT, GPT, etc.)
• Presentation experience with the ability to explain complex AI/ML concept and results to technical and non-technical audiences
• Understanding of mathematical foundations of machine learning, including statistics, linear algebra, and computer science

Preferred Qualifications:        

• PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related discipline
• Experience in healthcare (AI)
• Experience working with cross-functional and distributed teams in a global and diverse environment
• Experience in establishing AI/ML best practices, standards, and ethics
• Experience with model observability tools for insights into the behavior, performance, and health of your deployed ML models (tracking, alerting, compliance monitoring, etc.)
• Working knowledge of Software Development tools and practices including DevOps and CI/CD tools (e.g., Git, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.)
• Security and vulnerability management (package scans, remediation)
• Familiarity with data versioning tools (Delta Lake, DVC, LakeFS, etc.)