Senior Manager - Architecture

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.

An individual in the Architecture job family is a strategic resource for UnitedHealth Group. This individual could be involved across many aspects of architecture, design, build, engineering and implementation of technical solutions and capabilities providing technical leadership. Responsible for communicating overall architecture vision, technical strategies, and trade-offs across various levels in the organization to gain buy-in. Will provide recommendations and technical guidance to improve performance, reliability, and reusability within the constraints of budget, resource and business dependencies. In base and mid-level roles, engages across teams in a capacity that ranges from assisting on in-flight initiatives, up to technical briefings and demonstrations of new technologies across the organization. In senior level roles, leads business solutions, capabilities, and is a solid influencer that engages with client executives and stakeholders.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Fine-tunes a large language model on proprietary data to improve its performance
• Develops new machine learning models from scratch
• Experiments with novel model architectures or algorithms
• Conducts and publishes research on AI models
• Research and develop cutting-edge AI models, including deep learning, reinforcement learning, and generative architectures
• Advance agentic capabilities by designing autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and interact with complex environments
• Prototype and refine novel algorithms to improve model performance, scalability, and interpretability
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to translate theoretical advancements into practical enterprise applications
• Conduct rigorous experimentation and benchmarking to evaluate model efficacy and robustness
• Publish findings, contribute to open-source initiatives, and stay abreast of emerging trends in AI research
• Ensure ethical AI development by incorporating fairness, transparency, and accountability into model design
• Optimize training pipelines and infrastructure for large-scale model deployment and continuous learning
• Mentor junior researchers and contribute to the development of internal AI knowledge bases and best practices
• Partner with data engineering and product teams to integrate AI solutions into production systems
• Provides leadership to and is accountable for the performance of managers and/or senior level professional staff
• Impact of work is most often at the operational or local business unit or market level
• 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 or master's degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field
• 10+ years of experience in software development
• 3+ years of experience delivering solutions with a focus on AI/ML
• Hands-on experience with Azure Functions, Azure Monitor, and App Insights
• Extensive experience implementing generative AI solutions using OpenAI compatible APIs
• Experience with Cloud-based AI and data services Python, Databricks, RAG, Agentic, AI Foundary, LangFuse
• Experience in GitHub & M365 Copilot,Deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Scikit Learn
• Experience with frontend development using React or Angular, and backend services using Java or .NET
• Knowledge of enterprise search, NLP, Speech AI, Vision AI, Supervised & unsupervised ML
• Solid understanding of RAG architecture including knowledge of vector databases and semantic search
• Proven expertise in Azure Document Intelligence, OCR, and Databricks
• Advanced proficiency in Python for AI/ML and automation
• Proven ability to lead the design and implementation of intelligent applications using Azure OpenAI, LLM Gateway, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques
• Proven ability to drive end-to-end delivery of AI-powered solutions across cross-functional teams
• Proven excellent communication and stakeholder management skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Azure certifications (e.g., Azure AI Engineer Associate, Azure Developer Associate)
• Experience with prompt engineering and fine-tuning LLMs
• Experience working in agile development environments
• Knowledge of Agentic AI concepts & Implementation

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.