Director AI/ML Engineering

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 diversity and inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health equity on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

The Optum Technology Digital team is on a mission to disrupt the healthcare industry, transforming UHG into an industry-leading Consumer brand. We deliver hyper-personalized digital solutions that empower direct-to-consumer, digital-first experiences, educating, guiding, and empowering consumers to access the right care at the right time. Our mission is to revolutionize healthcare for patients and providers by delivering cutting-edge, personalized and conversational digital solutions. We’re Consumer Obsessed, ensuring they receive exceptional support throughout their healthcare journeys. As we drive this transformation, we’re revolutionizing customer interactions with the healthcare system, leveraging AI, cloud computing, and other disruptive technologies to tackle complex challenges. Serving UnitedHealth Group’s digital technology needs, the Consumer Engineering team impacts millions of lives through UnitedHealthcare & Optum. 

 
We are seeking a dynamic individual who embodies modern engineering culture—someone with deep engineering expertise within a digital product model, a passion for innovation, and a relentless drive to enhance the consumer experience. Our ideal candidate thrives in an agile, fast-paced rapid-prototyping environment, embraces DevOps and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices, and champions the Voice of the Customer. If you are driven by the pursuit of excellence, eager to innovate, and excited to make a tangible impact within a team that embraces modern technologies and consumer-centric strategies, while prioritizing robust cyber-security protocols, we invite you to explore this exciting opportunity with us. Join our team and be at the forefront of shaping the future of healthcare, where your unique skills will not only be recognized but celebrated.  

 
The Unified Search Team at Optum is working to bring industry-leading search technology and user experiences to tens of millions of healthcare consumers and providers. We are looking for a Principal AI/ML engineer to join the Unified Enterprise Search (UES) team to collaborate with lines of business across the Optum/United Healthcare enterprise to develop, deploy, and integrate enterprise search services. Reporting to the Senior Distinguished Engineer/VP of Engineering, they will partner closely with Platform, Data Science, UI/UX, and Product teams and collaborate with numerous stakeholders across the business. 

We are forming a geographically distributed but cohesive and high-performing team of inquiring minds; we plan our teamwork around flexible schedules and other personal needs. You will be part of a group of innovators who will help drive the change for healthcare consumers. 
We are looking for seasoned software engineers and data scientists with leadership experience to manage an elite engineering team that works on complex problems related to search technology in healthcare. This individual should be able to take the lead on projects that may require the work of several teams to implement. We expect this leader to contribute to the design of our search services, collaborate with other leaders (e.g., platform, science, delivery) to create efficient solutions and deliver state-of-the-art production systems that are easy to maintain. 

Primary Responsibilities:

• Making transformative changes to our architecture and driving UES technical strategy 
• Evaluating and making decisions around the use of new or existing technologies and tools; influencing other Principals, Directors, and their technical teams to build the right systems that can scale to the needs of the business 
• Design, develop, and deliver strategically significant or demanding software that changes how we engineer solutions 
• Build exemplary architecture solutions in terms of efficiency, stability, extensibility, and the ability to evolve over time 
• Decompose significantly complex engineering problems into straightforward solutions; define an architecture for these solutions 
• Perform code reviews and mentor junior engineers. Work as the front-facing technical lead for the data engineering team 
• Assist with recruiting and hiring 
• Influence the technical direction of the team 
• Build the team into an engineering center of excellence 
• 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:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, applied mathematics, statistics, applied statistics, economics, or similar quantitative fields of study 
• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record of leading large-scale projects; hands-on experience in data flows, ETL, large-scale analytics, and search engine (e.g., Vespa, Elastic Search) 
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with LLM-based search and/or chat applications 
• 2+ years of experience with most/some of the following: cloud computing platforms (Azure, AWS or GCP), data processing platforms (Databricks, Snowflake or similar), orchestration tools (Airflow, ArgoFlow, Azure Data Factory, or similar), data streaming platforms (Kafka, Flink, Event Hub, or similar), and service tools (e.g.FastAPI); working knowledge of Docker/K8s or similar platforms 
• Solid hands-on engineering and people management experience (in small technical teams) 
• Experience with building large-scale software systems or maintainable ML models that have been successfully delivered to customers 
• Skilled in Python, Java, or other data-intensive programming languages 
• Proven excellent written and oral skills 
• Proven ability to work well under pressure and meet deadlines 
• Proven excellent analytical skills; attention to detail, and documentation 
• Proven interest in working with complex data sets 
• Proven desire to make data better, cleaner, and ML-ready 
• Proven interest in building new mechanisms for different data domains 
• Proven drive to build for the enterprise 

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advanced degree in computer science or related field 
• 2+ years of hands-on experience as a principal-level software engineer 
• Experience in leadership roles including experience managing direct reports  
• Visionary leadership and solid business acumen in healthcare 
• Knowledge of professional software engineering and best practices for the complete software development life cycle, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, build process, testing, and operations; familiarity with CI/CD and Agile environments
• Familiarity with healthcare data or data platforms 
• Familiarity with taxonomy/ontology tools 
• Deep understanding of fundamental concepts behind recommendation systems, machine learning, deep learning, NLP, or other related ML modeling techniques 
• Proven track record of leading the delivery of large-scale, high-quality systems 
• Proven ability to analyze problems and develop actionable and appropriate tactical plans quickly 
• Proven ability to translate business needs and requirements into technical solutions 

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.