AI or 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. The team builds and operates AI-powered conversational experiences delivered through Optum's digital channels, enabling users to access information, guidance, and support through natural language interactions. The platform is powered by an AI orchestration layer that integrates large language models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), cloud-based agent runtimes, serverless backend services, enterprise integrations, and conversational memory to support a broad range of healthcare and business use cases. These experiences are designed to provide personalized, context-aware assistance while improving user engagement, operational efficiency, and self-service outcomes across web and digital platforms. The team operates at the intersection of healthcare and generative AI, driving meaningful cost reductions and serving millions of member interactions per year.

Take ownership of designing, developing, testing, deploying, and maintaining AI/ML models and large language model-based agent applications for consumer-facing pharmacy and benefits management experiences Build and improve multi-tool agent workflows that integrate large language models with APIs, serverless backend services, and enterprise pharmacy and benefits systems Design and implement conversation state, memory and context handling, and response personalization for multi-turn user interactions Contribute significantly to the architecture, implementation, and management of cloud infrastructure for AI solutions, utilizing Infrastructure as Code principles for reliable deployments Improve model and agent quality through evaluation loops, error analysis, prompt and tool tuning, and continuous experimentation Design and build reusable AI/ML platforms, components, and frameworks to accelerate innovation across the engineering team Exhibit technical best practices for AI systems in regulated environments Stay current with advancements in generative AI, large language model tooling, and agentic frameworks; propose innovative ways to tackle healthcare challenges 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: 4+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years building AI/ML or LLM-enabled applications Hands-on experience with cloud-native development on a major cloud platform Solid Python engineering skills and experience building production backend services and APIs Experience building and integrating LLM-based applications (prompting, tool/function calling, retrieval, evaluation) Experience with CI/CD pipelines, code quality controls, and production incident support Experience with observability and debugging in distributed systems Demonstrated solid ability to work collaboratively across diverse groups of business and technical stakeholders Proven exceptional ability to communicate with both