Senior AI or ML Engineer

Requisition Number: 2396714
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.
As a Sr AI/ML Engineer, you will design, build, and deploy innovative artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions that transform pharmacy benefit operations and patient care delivery. Our team's vision is to harness advanced predictive modeling, natural language processing, and scalable AI platforms to optimize prescription workflows, improve medication adherence, and ensure affordable healthcare access for millions of members. In this role, you will work on high-impact initiatives-leveraging modern cloud architectures, enterprise ML pipelines, and automated intelligence-to solve complex healthcare challenges at enterprise scale.
Primary Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and deploy scalable AI-powered solutions, including conversational AI, summarization, knowledge retrieval, data extraction, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications to address complex business challenges
• Develop and optimize machine learning and large language model (LLM) solutions using prompt engineering, fine-tuning, parameter-efficient tuning techniques, and model performance optimization methodologies
• Build, automate, and maintain end-to-end MLOps pipelines encompassing data preparation, model training, validation, CI/CD, deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle management
• Integrate AI and machine learning capabilities into enterprise applications, APIs, microservices, and business workflows using platforms such as Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Services, and open-source AI frameworks
• Design and implement vector search and agentic AI solutions leveraging embeddings, vector databases, and orchestration frameworks to deliver accurate, context-aware experiences
• Establish and maintain robust AI governance, evaluation, and quality assurance practices, including model benchmarking, hallucination reduction, guardrails, Responsible AI controls, and output validation
• Monitor and optimize AI systems for performance, scalability, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, model drift, and data quality to ensure production readiness and operational excellence
• Leverage enterprise-approved AI, low-code, and no-code platforms to accelerate development, automate processes, improve engineering productivity, and deliver business value
• Evaluate emerging AI technologies, architectures, and industry trends to drive innovation, improve solution effectiveness, and support strategic technology adoption
• Collaborate with product, engineering, data, security, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable, secure, and maintainable AI solutions while contributing to architecture reviews, code reviews, and technical best practices
• 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:

• Advanced degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related quantitative field
• 7+ years of software engineering or machine learning engineering experience developing and deploying production-grade AI/ML systems
• Hands-on experience developing generative AI applications, large language models (LLMs), or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architectures
• Hands-on expertise in Python, SQL
• Experience working with healthcare data, clinical workflows, or pharmacy benefit management (PBM) systems
• Experience with containerization, orchestration, and CI/CD tools (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, or GitHub Actions)
• Proven experience building end-to-end ML pipelines, model serving APIs, and MLOps workflows in cloud environments (e.g., Azure, AWS, or GCP)
• Practical experience applying responsible AI principles, data governance, and rigorous model evaluation techniques
• Demonstrated proficiency with Python and core machine learning frameworks

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.