AI/ML Engineer

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.  

The AI / ML / Agent Engineer owns the intelligence layer of the solution. This person designs, builds, evaluates, and improves the AI components, including LLM workflows, RAG pipelines, agentic behaviors, classifiers, summarizers, copilots, and AI evaluation frameworks.

This role ensures the AI is useful, measurable, safe, and fit for enterprise use.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design AI solution patterns aligned to the business problem and risk profile
• Build LLM workflows, prompt chains, agents, RAG patterns, model integrations, classification models, summarization flows, or decision-support tools
• Develop prompt strategies, tool-calling patterns, grounding techniques, guardrails, and fallback behaviors
• Partner with Data Engineer to ensure the AI has access to trusted, appropriate, and governed data
• Build and maintain evaluation datasets, scoring rubrics, model-performance tests, and failure-mode analysis
• Monitor and improve output quality, hallucination risk, relevance, accuracy, consistency, latency, and cost
• Partner with QA, Responsible AI, security, privacy, compliance, and architecture teams
• Document model behavior, known limitations, risk controls, and operational monitoring needs

• Support production readiness for AI components, including model observability and drift monitoring

• 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:

• Full-time graduation degree
• Practical experience building AI-enabled applications, not just experiments
• Experience with model APIs, orchestration frameworks, data pipelines, and evaluation tooling
• Understanding of model limitations, hallucination risks, bias/fairness concerns, and responsible AI practices
• Solid understanding of LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt engineering, agent frameworks, model evaluation, and AI safety
• Solid Python or equivalent engineering skills
• Ability to design AI workflows that are explainable, testable, and governable

Preferred Qualifications:

• ML engineer, AI engineer, applied scientist, data scientist with engineering depth, or FDE with AI specialization
• Experience building LLM applications in enterprise settings
• Experience with controlled testing, model evaluation, and production AI monitoring

Success measures

• AI outputs are relevant, accurate, useful, and measurable
• Evaluation framework is in place before broad rollout
• Known AI risks are identified and mitigated
• AI performance improves through feedback and iteration
• Solution passes Responsible AI, security, and compliance expectations
• AI components are understandable and supportable by steady-state teams

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.