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.

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.

As the Principal AI/ML Engineer, you will be leading the AI/ML team in India. You and your team will be responsible for the development, execution and enablement of the design and deployment of high impact enterprise AI problems, including problems related to disease prediction and identification, patient engagement, and optimization of clinical trials using both structured and unstructured (text) data. As a thought leader, you will establish guidance on how to develop, execute, and deploy AI models in compliance with enterprise standards. As a subject matter expert, you will work closely with other engineering teams and leaders to drive the adoption of quality and efficiency standards.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Lead a team of 15, including both engineers and data scientists

• Develop and execute the vision for engineering platforms, and reusable code that will be used by thousands of other engineers for automation and improved efficiency of AI/ML development

• Stay up to date with latest technologies and literature recommending solutions to improve business goals

• Evangelize the benefits of the AI models and platforms built in our team to drive adoption for employees and functional roles across the UHG enterprise including technology, operations, marketing, legal, compliance, people team, internal infrastructure, and more

• Mentor data scientists, AI/ML scientists, and other engineers to ensure the delivery of the AI/ML projects, and provide guidance on how to best use specific tools or technologies to achieve the desired results

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to determine applicability of AI to business problems

• Closely collaborate with the Responsible Use of AI (RUAI) team to ensure that the delivered solutions are compliant with the company policies and standards

• Create and manage best practices for ML models integration, orchestration, and deployment, that will ensure secure, consistent, and efficient use of resources across the UHG enterprise, including data versioning, ingress and model output egress, CI/CD pipelines for MLOps and DevOps functions

• Automate the provisioning and configuration of infrastructure resources

• Create documentation for infrastructure design and deployment procedures

• 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:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Math, Statistics, or a related STEM field with equivalent experience

• Either 10+ years of experience in a technical engineering role, including 3+ years leading a technical team, or a PhD in Computer Science or a related field and 5+ years engineering role, including 3+ years leading a technical team

• The above experience should include 3+ years focused on AI/ML solutions delivery

• Demonstrated experience leading and implementing AI/ML projects from ideation to delivery, evaluation, and maintenance in production

• Hands on familiarity with Python and one of PySpark or Scala, including demonstrable proficiency of AI/ML frameworks and tools (e.g., MLFlow, TensorFLow, PyTorch)

• Knowledge of the software development life cycle

• Proven excellent communication, presentation, and interpersonal skills, with the ability to explain complex AI/ML concept and results to technical and non-technical audiences

Preferred Qualifications:

• A graduate degree (Master’s or PhD) in computer science, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related STEM discipline

• Experience in healthcare (AI)

• Experience working with cross-functional and distributed teams in a global and diverse environment

• Experience in mentoring and coaching AI/ML talent

• Experience in establishing AI/ML best practices, standards, and ethics

• A portfolio of AI/ML publications, patents, or awards

• Familiarity with Gen AI solution pipeline engineering, (e.g., RAG) and Large Language Modeling and Transformer Architectures (e.g., BERT, GPT, etc.)

• Working knowledge of Software Development tools and practices including DevOps and CI/CD tools (e.g., Git, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.)

• Security and vulnerability management (package scans, remediation)

• Familiarity with data versioning tools (Delta Lake, DVC, LakeFS, etc.)

• Familiarity with model observability tools for insights into the behavior, performance, and health of your deployed ML models (tracking, alerting, compliance monitoring, etc.)

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.