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 Sr Principal AI/ML Engineer, AI & Product Office owns the hardest technical bets and the foundation the team builds on, and builds and deploys the AI-enabled products that help the Chief AI & Product Officer (CAIPO) drive Optum Health's enterprise AI-enabled product strategy, Agenix solutions portfolio, and product capability agenda. This hands-on role writes production code every day and builds end to end: the services, the integrations with electronic health records and care systems, the agents, and the evaluation that proves they work. The Sr Principal AI/ML Engineer sets the engineering standard by doing the work, not by managing a team.
This individual is accountable for whether what ships keeps working once patients and care teams depend on it, and for building it so that it runs without them. The Sr Principal AI/ML Engineer works as one team with product, design, clinical, and operations partners, and with great Optum Health engineering teams, so each accelerates the other.
This is a job for a builder. The team is just starting, and you will help build it and shape how it innovates, at the highest level. The office is small today, and that is by design: its leverage is the enterprise AI investment it drives across Optum Health. AI coding and agent tools are how this team writes software, and the standard for what ships does not get softer because of it.
The AI & Product Office is building a small, cross-functional product team: product management, engineering, product design, service design, deployment, and clinical, working alongside care team members from each local market team. The team embeds with a local Optum Health market team to find problems with the people who do the work, then design, build, deploy, and measure the products that fix them. What the team learns in the first market is written down as the method for the next one.
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.
Primary Responsibilities: Build & Deploy
- Design, build, test, and deploy production software end to end, from backend services and data pipelines to the interfaces care teams and patients use
- Own how the team deploys: cloud infrastructure as code, continuous integration and deployment, environments, and release practices safe for software that touches patient care
- Build integrations that read from and write to electronic health records and care systems, including Epic, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks, and home care platforms, using FHIR, HL7, and vendor APIs, in partnership with the teams that own those systems
- Build AI agents and large language model features across the channels patients and staff already use, including SMS and voice, with the prompt and tool design, retrieval, and guardrails that keep an agent inside what it is approved to do
- Prototype against real systems in days, and take what works to production
- Build the shared foundation the team builds on with great Optum Health engineering teams: integrations, the deployment pipeline, and the evaluation harness
Evaluate & Operate
- Build evaluation into the product from the start: automated evaluations of model and agent behavior, tests that fail when behavior breaks, and monitoring for drift after launch. Measuring a non-deterministic system is a first-class engineering job on this team, not a testing afterthought
- Operate what you ship: instrumentation, alerting, incident response, and continuous improvement after launch
- Define "done" as proven: a change is complete when there is evidence it works, not when the code is merged, and report what did not work as quickly as what did
- Partner with technology, data, security, legal, privacy, compliance, care teams, and other stakeholders to deliver products that are responsible, secure, and enterprise-ready, protecting patient data by design through data minimization, access control, and audit
Partner & Multiply
- Work with great Optum Health engineering teams to accelerate and augment each other's work, and write the documentation, tests, and runbooks another team needs to run what you built without you
- Set the team's engineering practices, including code review, AI-assisted development, and the evaluation standard, and improve them as the team grows
- Determine which technical decisions belong to a single market and which belong to the enterprise platform, and build accordingly
- Write down what the team learns each week so it is reviewed on cadence and turned into decisions.
- Raise the AI fluency of the market teams you work with by contributing to shared templates, evaluation bars, and a supported way to ship, so care teams can use and build with AI safely
- Own the team's technical architecture and the decisions that are expensive to reverse, and write each one down with what would change it
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.
Required Qualifications: - 10+ years of professional software engineering experience shipping and operating production systems
- Experience in the healthcare industry and/or within a large, complex, matrixed organization.
- Full-stack experience: backend services, APIs, and data stores, and enough front-end or mobile to ship a complete product without waiting on another team
- Experience building and shipping a large language model application or agent to real users, and can explain how it was evaluated
- Ability to use AI coding and agent tools in your own work every day, and has built with them: an agent, automation, or large language model tool you designed, built, and ran, at work or as a personal project
- Demonstrated solid testing and operational discipline: automated tests, continuous integration, observability, and on-call ownership of what you ship
- Experience with owned cloud infrastructure and deployment for a production system: infrastructure as code, continuous integration and deployment, and security controls that pass an enterprise review
- Ability to work at the enterprise level and at a single market's level, and to tell which one a given decision belongs to
- Demonstrated clear writing skills: design decisions and findings on this team are written down where the next engineer will find them
- Ability working proficiency in GitHub, AI coding and agent tools, cloud platforms, and infrastructure as code
- Experience as a senior individual contributor, hands-on: writes production code every day and owns hard problems end to end, working across functions to deliver them
- Ability to be a technical owner of a system other engineers built on, including its architecture and the decisions that were hard to reverse
Preferred Qualifications: - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Experience with healthcare data and integration: FHIR, HL7, SMART on FHIR, or Epic, athenahealth, or eClinicalWorks APIs
- Experience building on HIPAA-regulated systems handling protected health information
- Experience with evaluation frameworks for large language model systems, including building evaluation sets with domain experts
- Production experience with voice or SMS agents
- Experience taking an AI capability through an enterprise governance or review process in healthcare
- Experience on a small, early-stage product team where engineers owned the whole stack
Core Competencies:- Building with AI: uses agents and automation to do the job, not only to describe it
- End-to-end product engineering and deployment
- Healthcare systems integration: FHIR, HL7, and electronic health record APIs
- Evaluation and measurement of AI systems
- Operational ownership and reliability
- Security and privacy by design
- Enterprise and market-level judgment
- Partnership with Optum Health engineering teams
- Technical writing and documentation
- Technical architecture and platform ownership
*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy.
Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer benefits such as, a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). No matter where or when you begin a career with us, you'll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $184,600 - $316,500 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.
Application Deadline: This will be posted for a minimum of 2 business days or until a sufficient candidate pool has been collected. Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.
At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. Together, we are shaping the future of healthcare by harnessing technology and innovation to make care simpler to navigate, more affordable and more connected for the people we serve. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcomed, valued, heard and respected, empowering people to bring their authentic selves to work and strengthening our collective impact through diverse talents, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.
UnitedHealth Group and its affiliated brands are an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.
UnitedHealth Group and its affiliated brands are a drug-free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.
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