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.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Contribute to experimentation with novel ML and Generative AI architectures
• Create and maintain embedding models (domain-specific embeddings, document/text embeddings)
• Support Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) solutions, including semantic search, vector databases, and LLM integration
• Help design and implement AI powered enterprise applications
• Analyze large datasets to identify trends, patterns, and actionable insights
• Partner with AI/ML Engineers and Leads to enhance existing models and improve model accuracy and performance
• Optimize AI pipelines for scalability, performance, reliability, and cost efficiency
• Integrate AI/ML solutions into enterprise systems by partnering closely with data engineering, product, and platform teams
• Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders, communicating complex technical concepts clearly
• Contribute to skill development for engineers and interns in AI/LLM techniques
• Comply with company policies, procedures, and directives
• 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:

• Bachelor's/Master's in CS, Engineering, Mathematics/Statistics, or related
• 4+ years of relevant experience, including solid ML model development
• Hands-on expertise in Databricks, Spark, Python, Scala, SQL
• LLM & GenAI Skills:
  • Creating custom embedding models
  • Building RAG pipelines
  • Vector DBs & semantic search
  • Using LangChain for agentic workflows (tools, agents, memory)
  • Experience with OpenAI/Azure OpenAI APIs
  • Experience with Azure cloud for compute, security, and resource management
  • CI/CD familiarity using Git, GitHub Actions/Jenkins, Terraform
• Proven solid ability to build ML models end to end (data prep → feature creation → training → evaluation)
• Proven excellent communication and partnership skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with multimodal or transformer-based models
• NLP or enterprise search experience
• Agile/Scrum experience
• Domain knowledge
• Knowledge of Call Center (Member & Provider)
• Knowledge of Provider RCM
• Knowledge of EHR/clinical datasets
• Proven healthcare or PI/FWA analytics exposure

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.