Lead AI/ML Engineer - Remote

Lead AI/ML Engineer - Remote at UnitedHealth Group

Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together. This is a high-impact technical leadership role within the Optum Tech AI Transformation team, supporting key enterprise initiatives such as the Real-Time AI Underwriting platform. You will own the technical direction and people leadership for a squad of AI/ML engineers, driving strategic engineering efforts. Beyond building, you will lead, mentor, govern, and ensure that everything your team delivers meets the highest standards of quality, compliance, and Responsible AI. You'll serve as a bridge between engineering execution and leadership vision, ensuring AI investments translate into measurable, production-grade business outcomes. You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges. For all hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area, you will be required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week.

Design, develop, and deploy production-grade AI-powered solutions-spanning classical ML, Generative AI (LLMs, RAG, Graph RAG), and multi-agent orchestration frameworks-to address complex business challenges with emphasis on responsible and secure AI practices Own the end-to-end AI/ML technical roadmap, defining architectural direction, choosing optimal technologies, and establishing engineering and coding standards for the team's portfolio Use enterprise-approved AI tools to streamline workflows, automate tasks, and drive continuous improvement across the development lifecycle, optimizing team productivity and operational efficiency Evaluate emerging trends and technologies (such as Agentic AI, foundation models, fine-tuning, and enterprise AI tooling) to inform high-quality solution design and strategic innovation Drive MLOps maturity across development pipelines, overseeing model versioning, CI/CD for ML, retraining automation, drift detection, and production monitoring Ensure compliance and ethical governance by aligning solutions with enterprise policies, Responsible AI principles, and data privacy regulations (HIPAA/PHI handling) Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 5-10 direct/indirect AI/ML engineers, setting clear goals, conducting regular 1:1s, and fostering a high-performance, self-managed culture Own and conduct robust technical reviews (architecture, design, and code reviews) to enforce rigorous standards, security posture, and pythonic best practices You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

10+ years of software development experience with a strong engineering and architecture foundation 2+ years of hands-on experience in AI/ML project implementation (full lifecycle from ideation, data analysis, model development through production deployment) Hands-on experience with NLP (text processing, embeddings, transformers, NER, text classification, or conversational AI)