Senior Manager AI/ML Engineering

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.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design, build, deploy, and maintain scalable machine learning and Generative AI solutions supporting clinical, pharmacy, payer, and operational use cases
• Develop predictive models, recommendation systems, NLP solutions, deep learning models, and LLM-based applications to solve complex business problems
• Build and optimize data pipelines, feature engineering workflows, and model training frameworks using large-scale healthcare and business datasets
• Design and implement Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architectures, vector search solutions, prompt engineering techniques, and LLM evaluation frameworks
• Fine-tune and deploy foundation models while ensuring reliability, scalability, security, and performance
• Implement MLOps and LLMOps best practices including CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, model deployment, experiment tracking, monitoring, and observability
• Collaborate with data scientists, product managers, architects, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable AI solutions
• Ensure adherence to Responsible AI principles, data governance standards, HIPAA requirements, and enterprise security controls
• Analyze model performance and continuously improve model accuracy, latency, cost, and user experience through experimentation and optimization
• Provide technical leadership, mentor junior engineers, conduct code reviews, and contribute to engineering best practices and standards
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies and recommend innovative approaches that create measurable business value
• Support production AI systems through monitoring, issue resolution, root cause analysis, and continuous improvement efforts
• 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:

• Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Software Engineering, Data Science, Analytics, or a related technical discipline
• 15+ years of overall technology experience, with a solid background in software engineering, application development, data/analytics platforms, or enterprise solution delivery
• 5+ years of hands-on programming experience, with solid proficiency in Python and SQL
• Proven experience designing and developing enterprise-grade software solutions, with emphasis on scalability, reliability, maintainability, performance, security, and operational supportability
• Solid experience designing and implementing REST APIs, FastAPI or equivalent API frameworks, microservices, and service-based architectures
• Experience with modern application development frameworks and tools such as Flask, Streamlit, React or similar UI/application frameworks
• Solid experience with Docker/containerized applications, CI/CD practices, source control, automated testing, code quality standards, and modern software development lifecycle practices
• Experience designing, developing, and deploying applications in one or more major cloud platforms such as Azure, AWS, or GCP
• Experience implementing solutions involving large datasets, database technologies, SQL/NoSQL platforms, data pipelines, and enterprise data integration
• Demonstrated experience applying analytical techniques to complex business problems, including the ability to break down ambiguous problems, identify root causes, evaluate alternatives, and recommend technically sound solutions
• Solid foundation in computer science fundamentals, including data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, distributed systems, software design patterns, system integration, and application architecture
• Solid understanding of data engineering and analytics concepts, including data modeling, data transformation, structured and unstructured data processing, data quality, and analytical solution development
• Solid understanding of production engineering considerations including logging, monitoring, observability, exception handling, performance optimization, security, and application support
• Proven solid product and engineering mindset, with demonstrated ability to work directly with business and technology stakeholders to understand requirements, translate business problems into technical solutions, and take ownership of end-to-end delivery
• Proven excellent analytical, problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder-management skills
• Proven ability to provide technical leadership through solution architecture, design reviews, code reviews, engineering standards, technical mentoring, and delivery governance

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with additional programming languages such as Java, C#, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar languages
• Experience with multiple machine learning and analytical techniques such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, NLP, deep learning, or statistical modeling
• Experience working in healthcare, health technology, financial services, or another highly regulated enterprise environment
• Experience building platforms or applications involving analytics, data products, workflow automation, decision-support systems, or intelligent applications
• AI / Generative AI Experience
  • Practical experience applying Generative AI or Large Language Models (LLMs) to enterprise use cases
  • Experience implementing solutions using RAG, embeddings, vector databases, prompt engineering, LLM APIs, or model fine-tuning
  • Experience developing AI agents or agentic workflows using frameworks such as LangGraph, Google ADK, CrewAI, or comparable technologies
  • Experience with Document AI, OCR, intelligent document processing, information extraction, and structured-output generation
  • Experience deploying and operating AI/ML or LLM-based workloads in enterprise environments
  • Understanding of both commercial and open-source LLM ecosystems and the architectural considerations for deploying LLM-based applications
  • Exposure to AI-assisted software development tools and development lifecycle approaches, including tools such as GitHub Copilot, Claude, Codex, or similar engineering assistants
  • Familiarity with libraries and platforms such as PyTorch, OpenAI APIs, Hugging Face, or similar AI/ML technologies
• Familiarity with enterprise architecture, cloud-native development, API management, security, privacy, and governance practices
• Understanding of emerging developments in AI, machine learning, NLP, software engineering, and cloud technologies, with the ability to evaluate where new technologies provide practical business value

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