Sr AI or ML Engineer - Machine Learning, NLP and Generative AI

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.

We are seeking a highly self-driven AI/ML Engineer with solid software engineering fundamentals, backend development expertise, who is familiar with Agentic AI, and able to contribute across the full stack including modern web technologies such as Next.js. The ideal candidate can understand business challenges, independently drive solutions, and deliver production-ready AI applications end to end.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Develop novel AI strategies to drive complex healthcare solutions by building machine learning, deep learning, and Generative AI models using cutting-edge methods
• Research, design and implement scalable innovative machine learning models to support production processes, which includes processing and transforming source data to be used in machine learning pipelines, leveraging cloud computing
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to determine applicability of AI to business problems
• Demonstrate self-driven initiative by taking ownership and creating end-to-end solutions
• Design, develop, and deploy scalable AI-powered applications by building robust backend services, APIs, ML pipelines, and user-facing interfaces that support production-grade solutions
• Apply solid software engineering principles and take end-to-end ownership of solutions, ensuring reliability, scalability, maintainability, security, and continuous improvement of AI and software systems
• 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:

• MS in computer science or software engineering (PhD preferred)
• 3+ years of experience in using ML to solve problems in natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI
• 3+ years of deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and/or TensorFlow
• Knowledge of publications in prominent research journals and conferences
• Familiarity with state-of-the-art LLM research and modern agentic frameworks/tools
• Proven capability of implementing ML pipelines in production

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with frontend development using React and/or Next.js
• Experience with integrating AI capabilities into customer-facing user experiences
• Experience with collaborating closely with product and business stakeholders
• Proven ability to develop full-stack AI applications spanning frontend, backend, APIs, and AI services

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.

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