Senior 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 are looking for an experienced SG28  to join our engineering organization and help build and modernize large-scale, enterprise applications.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who enjoys solving complex engineering problems while influencing architecture, engineering standards, cloud adoption, application reliability, and the technical direction of the team.

The ideal candidate combines strong Java and full-stack engineering fundamentals with experience building applications on AWS, designing APIs and distributed systems, operating production platforms, and using modern AI-assisted engineering practices.

You will work closely with product, architecture, engineering, business, and platform teams to take solutions from requirements and technical design through implementation, production deployment, and ongoing operational ownership.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Hands-on Engineering & Technical Leadership
  • Design, develop, test, and deliver enterprise-scale applications using Java, Spring Boot, APIs, microservices, and modern web technologies
  • Remain actively involved in engineering, including solution design, coding, code reviews, troubleshooting, and technical problem solving
  • Provide technical direction for complex features and engineering initiatives
  • Review designs and pull requests and help establish strong engineering standards across the team
  • Mentor engineers and help improve the overall technical capability of the engineering organization
  • Break complex technical challenges into practical, incremental solutions
• Cloud & Platform Engineering
  • Design and build scalable, resilient, and secure applications on AWS
  • Support modernization of applications from legacy environments to modern cloud-native architectures
  • Apply appropriate cloud architecture patterns for scalability, resiliency, security, observability, and cost effectiveness
  • Partner with infrastructure, networking, security, and platform engineering teams to resolve complex production and cloud issues
  • Contribute to architecture decisions involving APIs, microservices, databases, messaging, caching, networking, and application deployment
• Application Reliability & Operational Excellence
  • Own applications through the complete software lifecycle, including production
  • Drive improvements in availability, performance, scalability, observability, and operational readiness
  • Participate in troubleshooting and root-cause analysis for complex production incidents
  • Use logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and application telemetry to identify and resolve system issues
  • Identify recurring operational problems and drive engineering solutions that prevent repeat incidents
  • Incorporate reliability and production-readiness considerations into solution design rather than treating them as post-production activities
• AI-Enabled Engineering
  • Apply Generative AI and AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity and software delivery
  • Explore practical use cases involving LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enterprise knowledge retrieval, and AI assistants
  • Use tools such as GitHub Copilot and related AI engineering capabilities responsibly throughout the software development lifecycle
  • Help teams adopt AI-enabled development practices while maintaining engineering quality, security, and appropriate governance
• Architecture & Engineering Quality
  • Translate business requirements into scalable technical designs
  • Evaluate solution alternatives and communicate architectural trade-offs clearly
  • Develop reusable engineering patterns and reduce unnecessary technical complexity
  • Champion secure coding practices, automated testing, code quality, and engineering standards
  • Proactively identify technical debt, security gaps, performance risks, and opportunities for modernization
  • Collaborate with architecture and engineering teams to ensure solutions align with broader enterprise technology standards
• Collaboration & Ownership
  • Work closely with product managers, product owners, architects, engineers, SRE/platform teams, and business stakeholders
  • Take end-to-end ownership of technical outcomes rather than limiting responsibility to individual development tasks
  • Communicate complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
  • Help teams make informed decisions by presenting solution options, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs
  • Contribute to an engineering culture centered on accountability, continuous improvement, collaboration, and innovation
• Comply with all applicable Company policies, procedures, and business directives, changes including those relating to work location, team assignments, work schedules, and flexible work arrangements.

Required Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience building or operating applications in AWS or another major public cloud, with strong preference for AWS
• Advanced hands-on experience with Java and Spring Boot
• Experience designing and developing REST APIs and microservices
• Experience with modern full-stack application development
• Experience with relational and/or NoSQL databases
• Experience troubleshooting complex production systems and application performance issues
• Solid professional software engineering experience building enterprise applications
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and enterprise application architecture
• Solid understanding of software engineering fundamentals, design patterns, automated testing, CI/CD, and source-control practices
• Solid understanding of application security and secure software engineering practices
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and mentor other engineers
• Demonstrated solid analytical, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience modernizing large legacy or on-premises applications to AWS/cloud-native architectures
• Experience with technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, MongoDB, Redis, API gateways, and cloud-native observability platforms
• Experience with React, Angular, TypeScript, or similar modern front-end technologies
• Experience building highly available enterprise platforms with defined reliability and service-level objectives
• Experience using GitHub Copilot or similar AI-assisted software development tools
• Experience working within regulated, healthcare, financial-services, or other large enterprise technology environments
• Experience influencing architecture and engineering standards across multiple teams
• sExposure to Generative AI, LLMs, RAG architectures, vector search, AI agents, or enterprise AI platforms

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.