Lead AI/ML Engineer

Optum is a global organisation 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. 

In healthcare, evolution doesn’t just happen. It takes innovation, imagination, and a passion for solving problems in new and better ways. And innovation is taking place at a lightning-fast pace every day at Optum.  
As the fastest growing part of the UnitedHealth Group family of businesses, we’re expanding our team in Ireland and creating excellent opportunities for those who want greater purpose and more impact in their work. We’ll provide the investment, support, and resources to advance your career. You’ll provide the talent, ambition, and drive. 

Optum Rx is looking for an experienced, curious, and self-motivated individual to lead a team that will be responsible for the development of new products and services for the organization. Partnering with business stakeholders, data science teams and technology teams, you will build strong relationships with our internal stakeholders, acquiring knowledge of the business and driving strategic platform build.  
You will join a team of product managers, product owners, data scientists, and analysts who are responsible for building the pricing platform for over $100 Billion of prescription drug spend in the US Market annually. The team bring integrity, experience and calmness to what is a mammoth business. We have thousands of US clients, each with thousands of FDA approved drug prices to be managed.  We are using our predictive models to optimize millions of individual drug prices to ensure we deliver value for clients and ultimately people who are filling over 150 million prescriptions per year. 

We are accountable to manage one of the most complex areas of UnitedHealth Group, one of the largest companies in the world. We have to bring initiative, innovative thinking and curiosity to constantly evolve in a highly regulated environment. The changes we make have impact the next day for millions of people in the US market.  

Our team culture is built on trust. We give our team the space they need to deliver results and the environment to ensure they can have fun doing it. 

Primary Responsibilities:   

• Ability to lead cross-functional teams across engineering, and data science  

• Be a hands-on technical leader, actively contributing to model design, review and critical technical decision, and architecture. 

• Optimize models for performance, scalability and efficiency 

• Ability to take research whitepapers to production. Solid technical leadership to drive the Document Analysis team, which includes both data scientists and AI engineers.  

• Drives excellence and standardization across the data science team with a focus on skills development, training and career progression 

• Provide strategic and technical direction aligned to analytic efforts around AI/ML 

• Stay current on internal and external technological advances in AI and advanced analytics that can be applied to document processing 

• Drive inclusion and diversity as part of enhancing continued development of a strong diverse team culture 

You will be rewarded and recognised 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 providing development for other roles you may be interested in. 

Required Qualifications: 

• Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in engineering/relevant subject or equivalent experience
• Proven experience in Azure Cognitive Services 

• Proficiency in Python (especially with libraries like NLTK, Scikit-Learn, Kera) 

• Experience with NLP tasks (named entity recognition, text classification, table extraction, Jaccard and Cosine models, RAG) 

• Familiarity with REST APIs and microservices 

• Experience with version control (Git), Docker, and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) 

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience with document OCR tools (Document Intelligence, Tesseract, Amazon Textract) 

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and MLOps practices 

Please note you must currently be eligible to work and remain indefinitely without any restrictions in the country to which you are making an application. Proof will be required to support your application. 

All telecommuters will be required to adhere to the UnitedHealth Group’s Telecommuter Policy. 

 

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 marginalised 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. 

 

 

Diversity creates a healthier atmosphere: Optum is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to gender, civil status, family status, sexual orientation, disability, religion, age, race, and membership of the Traveller community, or any other characteristic protected by law. Optum is a drug-free workplace. © 2025 Optum Services (Ireland) Limited. All rights reserved. 

 

 

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