Director AI or 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 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:

• Strategic & Technical Leadership 
  • Define and execute vision for data science and engineering initiatives
  • Lead architecture and design of scalable, secure, high-performance systems
  • Drive modernization through cloud-native, open-source, and modular technologies
  • Own engineering metrics: availability, response time, time to value, and build time
• Engineering Execution 
  • Ensure engineering excellence in code quality, CI/CD, testing, and observability
  • Lead development of data federation platforms and robust MLOps pipelines
  • Take ownership of operational support and production issue resolution
• Collaboration & Influence 
  • Partner with TPOs, product, UX, and business teams to align on delivery
  • Collaborate globally to ensure smooth execution of cross-regional projects
  • Serve as a trusted advisor to engineering leadership
• Talent & Culture 
  • Mentor senior engineers and technical leads
  • Drive talent transformation and foster a high-performance engineering culture
  • Improve engineering practices and team agility
• Research & Communication 
  • Design experiments, conduct statistical analysis, and visualize data
  • Publish findings, patents, and lead AI workshops to promote adoption
  • Ensure compliance with Responsible Use of AI (RUAI) standards
• 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 or related field
• 12+ years of software engineering experience, including team leadership
• 8+ years working in Agile development environments
• 5+ years building cloud-enabled solutions (AWS)
• 5+ years in distributed systems and Big Data technologies
• Experience with LLM frameworks, NLP techniques (e.g., text embedding/classification), and Spark
• Experience developing AI use cases and deploying ML models in production
• Experience conducting AI workshops and fostering adoption across teams
• Familiarity with Snowflake, relational databases, and GitHub-based collaboration
• Deep understanding of system architecture and distributed/cloud-native systems (e.g., Kubernetes)
• Solid foundation in computer science fundamentals (algorithms, data structures)
• Skilled in cloud security and building secure enterprise platforms
• Proficient in multiple programming languages (e.g., Java, Python) and frameworks (e.g., Spring Boot, React)
• Proven success in leading geographically distributed teams, including hiring, development, and retention
• Proven solid project planning and execution skills (estimating, scheduling, delivery)
• Proven effective cross-functional collaboration with product, engineering, and business teams
• Proven to be a trusted partner to senior leadership with solid communication and presentation skills
• Proven ability to advocate for metrics-driven development and engineering best practices
• Track record of improving engineering efficiency and addressing bottlenecks
• Comfortable in fast-paced, collaborative, and evolving environments

Preferred Qualification:

• Experience in the healthcare sector

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.