Principal Technical Product Manager

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.    

Optum AI is UnitedHealth Group's enterprise AI team. We are AI/ML scientists and engineers with deep expertise in AI/ML engineering for health care. We develop AI/ML solutions for the highest impact opportunities across UnitedHealth Group businesses including UnitedHealthcare, Optum Financial, Optum Health, Optum Insight, and Optum Rx. In addition to transforming the health care journey through responsible AI/ML innovation, our charter also includes developing and supporting an enterprise AI/ML development platform.

As a product leader within the enterprise AI Platforms team in the Chief AI Office, you will own the product strategy and execution for a commercial AI platform - the secure, PHI-ready model access layer, the capability gateway that makes licensed intelligence callable from any approved agent or application, and the agent harness those agents run on. Your job is to decide what that platform becomes as a commercial product: what is packaged and sold, how it is priced and metered, what the platform commits to and for how long, and what it will deliberately not do.

This is a technical product management role, paired with an engineering organization who owns the technical architecture and build of the same platform. You will own what the platform commits to and why - roadmap, interface contracts, evaluation criteria and service levels. You will work directly with business and design partners on what is actually worth building, carry the business case through the capital funding process, align the commercial roadmap with the enterprise multi-platform strategy, and be accountable for measured outcomes: adoption, reuse, time to value and unit economics. Expect significant influence over platform direction and a short path between a design partner conversation and a change in the roadmap.

Optum AI team members:

• Have impact at scale: We have the data and resources to make an impact at scale. When our solutions are deployed, they have the potential to make health care system work better for everyone
• Do ground-breaking work: Many of our current projects involve cutting edge ML, NLP and LLM techniques. Generative AI methods for working with structured and unstructured health care data are continuously being developed and improved. We are working in one of the most important frontiers of AI/ML research and development
• Partner with world-class experts on innovative solutions: Our team members are developing novel AI/ML solutions to business challenges. In some cases, this includes the opportunity to file patents and publish papers about the methods we develop. We also collaborate with AI/ML researchers at some of the world's top universities

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:

• Own the product strategy, roadmap and measured outcomes for the commercial AI platform: secure, PHI-ready model access with favorable inference economics, the capability gateway that makes licensed intelligence callable from any approved agent or application, and the agent runtime those agents run on
• Define the commercial shape of the platform - what ships as a product versus what is delivered as a service, SKU and tier definitions, entitlement models, metering, and pricing mechanics that hold margin as underlying inference costs move
• Translate client demand, market signal and internal partner needs into a single prioritized backlog, and write requirements at a technical altitude engineers can build against: API and tool contracts, schemas, versioning and deprecation policy, conformance expectations, and SLOs
• Treat developer experience as an explicit product concern, with owned measures for time to first successful call, documentation and reference implementation quality, sandbox and test data access, and support and escalation paths
• Build and defend the business case: value story, addressable demand, TCO and margin model, and unit economics expressed per completed unit of work rather than per token - and carry that case through the capital funding process
• Define the instrumentation and measures the product is managed by, including adoption, reuse depth, time to value, quality and latency SLOs, cost per task, and retention, and use them to advance or retire roadmap items
• Bring build, buy, partner and adopt decisions for platform components to a recommendation jointly with engineering - owning the commercial case, roadmap impact and total cost of ownership while engineering owns the technical assessment - and communicate the trade-offs to senior leaders
• Work with security, privacy, legal, compliance and regulatory partners so that PHI handling, tenant isolation, BAA and data processing terms, model risk documentation and residency commitments are part of the product definition
• Coordinate go-to-market with sales, client engineering, forward-deployed engineering and operations: positioning, pricing approval, sales enablement, contracting patterns, client onboarding runbook, and the support and service-level model the platform can actually honor
• Ensure platform commitments are delivered on time and on budget, identifying and resolving risks and issues, and making scope calls explicitly rather than letting them resolve by default
• Partner with enterprise AI platform product leaders so the commercial offering remains an extension of the enterprise platform rather than a fork, and so shared capabilities are built once and consumed in both directions
• Use influence rather than authority to build a collaborative culture across engineering, design, architecture and business stakeholders, and represent the platform credibly to senior leadership and directly to clients

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:

• Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent experience
• 8+ years of technical product management experience, including platform, cloud or SaaS products
• 5+ years of experience creating product roadmaps from conception to launch, driving product vision, defining go-to-market strategy, and leading design discussions
• 3+ years of experience leading teams with diverse backgrounds in a technical organization
• Experience owning an API-first or platform product consumed by other engineering teams or external developers, including responsibility for interface contracts, versioning and deprecation
• Experience defining or launching products subject to security, privacy or regulatory constraints
• Proven working fluency with AI/ML and LLM-based systems - retrieval-augmented generation, tool and function calling, agent orchestration, and evaluation - sufficient to hold a technical design discussion and make trade-off decisions with engineering
• Demonstrated ability to explain complex technical results and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders, senior leaders and customers

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience on a 0-to-1 product or platform, or commercializing an internally built platform for external customers
• Experience defining, developing and maintaining platform-level scaled product solutions across a diverse set of stakeholders, with competing priorities between common capabilities and specific partner needs
• Familiarity with multi-tenant platform concerns: tenant isolation, quota and entitlement enforcement, and per-tenant cost and usage telemetry
• Experience with responsible AI practice, including model risk management, model documentation, or alignment to frameworks such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework or the EU AI Act
• Experience managing partner or vendor relationships with hyperscalers or major data and AI platform providers
• Experience building for or selling to payers, providers or health services organizations
• Health care industry experience: provider, payer, medical device, pharmaceutical, or other health services
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP), tool-calling standards, model gateways, or agent frameworks such as LangGraph or equivalent
• Proven solid communication, relationship and interpersonal skills, with the ability to influence leaders and multiple stakeholders with and without direct authority

*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 $134,600 - $230,800 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 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.    

UnitedHealth Group is 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 is a drug - free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment. 

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