Data Science

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. 

Primary Responsibilities:

• Collaborates across business units with stakeholders, providing thought leadership, and driving day-to-day implementation of our analytics strategy
• Evaluate statistical methods used to obtain the data to ensure validity, applicability, efficiency and accuracy. Interpret end-user technical requirements by specifying economic decision models, determining appropriate data sources, and performing detailed statistical analysis
• Create, analyze and maintain explanatory/predictive models of clinical behaviors on healthcare claims data. Work includes all phases of the modelling process: research design, data extraction and cleaning, model building and validation
• Research on the new fraud & abuse patterns and ideate new assignments/projects basis the secondary/data driven research
• Lead the advanced statistics domain for the team & develop/refine/improve predictive models using advance SAS, R and machine learning techniques and mentors junior/senior analysts/statisticians to develop their modeling/statistical skills
• Maintains staff by recruiting, selecting, orienting, and training employees; maintaining a safe, secure, and legal work environment; developing personal growth opportunities and accomplishes staff results by communicating job expectations; planning, monitoring, and appraising job results; coaching, counseling, and disciplining employees; developing, coordinating, and enforcing systems, policies, procedures, and productivity standards
• Co-ordinate with clinical/Coding SMEs for seeking the inputs to explore data extraction approach and road map the analysis mile stones
• Develop and maintain working relationships with key customer stakeholders
• Apply advanced machine learning and predictive modeling techniques to build, maintain, and improve on multiple predictive detection engines in Optum Enterprise Analytics
• Develop actionable machine learning solutions and propose recommendations and strategies to solve commercial opportunities in unique ways that return optimal value to our business
• Design and implement innovative analytic solutions including anomaly detection, member profiling and population level prediction and exploratory data analysis from unstructured and diverse datasets
• Apply knowledge of statistics, machine learning, programming, data modeling, simulation, and advanced mathematics to recognize patterns, identify opportunities, pose business questions, and make valuable discoveries to prototype development and product improvement
• Use a flexible, analytical approach to design, develop, and evaluate predictive and prescriptive models and advanced algorithms that result in optimal value extraction from the data
• Work with analytics and statistical software such as SQL, R, Python and Cloud tools to perform analysis and interpret data
• Deliver robust and scalable analytic solutions in an automation ready state
• Actively consult with business stakeholders and subject matter experts to ensure appropriate medical and business content is incorporated into analytic approaches
• Collaborate with lines of business to understand their analytic needs, contribute to shaping business solutions and communicate results of analytics
• Develop and expand a fledgling applied research program with focus on impact-focused initiatives, rapid prototyping, and obsession with converting applied research into software
• Be a hands-on leader and teach by example by building prototypes using variety of predictive methods while adhering to the ML development cycle (e.g. iterative EDA, prediction specification, feature engineering and model tuning)
• Participate in meetings business stakeholders, data experts, software/platform engineering, physicians to scope R&D use-cases and convert them into scope of work
• Be a thought leader and coach the junior team members in the wide variety of statistical/predictive methods (e.g. DL, VAE, Bayesian nets etc) to attack a given prediction use-case
• Build, mentor and lead a team of applied research scientists and data scientists
• 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:

• Graduate (Masters/Phd) degree in engineering, information, or statistics
• 7+ years of experience conducting statistical, research-minded analysis of variety of data types/forms with aim to utilize this analysis into building or optimizing predictive methods
• 5+ years of experience in programming with languages such as Python, R, SAS
• 4+ years of deep, hands-on experience with machine Learning applied to the healthcare or other high-stakes domains (direct experience in a cloud environment is highly valued)
• Experience comprising analytics service delivery, solution design and client management.
• Experience applying computational algorithms, statistical and programming methods using (R and Python) to structured and unstructured data
• Proven experience in understanding complex problems and datasets and driving data testing and strategic testing of ideas to come up with first-class solutions
• Expert focused on helping team improve modeling predictability, analytics driven strategy development, operational efficiency
• Self-drive knowledge accumulation of methods and modeling advances by reading research publications, blogs and attending presentations and webinars
• Demonstrable success within a Data Science environment focused on agile thinking and innovative solutions, delivering complex and large-scale projects
• Demonstrated ability to own and lead projects that deliver real business value
• Demonstrable leadership ability, superior problem solving and people management skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• MS or PhD in applied mathematics, computer science, engineering, statistics, bioinformatics, actuarial science, or similar numerical degree
• Experience with one or many of these topics such in customer churn, intent prediction, disease/damage progression, anomaly detection, sequence-based models, time-series forecasting or time to event modeling
• Experience in deploying machine learning models in a production setting (logging, monitoring, alerts) in a cloud environment
• Experience and understanding of US healthcare system, billing of medical claims and associated data environments
• Experience creating Machine learning solutions to solve complex issues
• Exposure to extracting and manipulating data via tool/libraries/forms such as pySpark, pandas, scikit family, numpy/scipy, matplotlib, streamlit

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.