Associate Director Actuarial Services - Remote - Cypress, CA or Minnetonka, MN preferred

UnitedHealth Group•Cypress, CA

5h•Remote

About The Position

At UnitedHealthcare, we’re simplifying the health care experience, creating healthier communities and removing barriers to quality care. The work you do here impacts the lives of millions of people for the better. Come build the health care system of tomorrow, making it more responsive, affordable and optimized. Ready to make a difference? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together. We are seeking a senior actuarial leader to own and evolve our enterprise Dynamic Pricing and benefit relativity platforms. This role combines deep health actuarial judgment with modern data and technology fluency to ensure pricing logic is accurate, explainable, compliant, scalable, and production ready. This Associate Director will be responsible for the actuarial integrity of our core pricing engines (including ARC - the Actuarial Relativity Calculator - and related parity/compliance logic), as well as their integration into underwriting and product workflows through APIs and modern data platforms. The work directly supports high visibility pricing decisions across Product, Underwriting, and Actuarial Pricing teams. This is a hands on, high accountability role. It is not an analyst or exam track position. Success requires FSA level independence, sound actuarial judgment, and the ability to work comfortably at the intersection of business logic, mathematics, and technology. 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.

Requirements

ASA or FSA Society of Actuaries designation
5+ years of actuarial work experience
Experience owning or critically reviewing pricing models used in production or near production environments
Proven solid foundation in health insurance pricing and benefit design mathematics
Demonstrated ability to explain complex actuarial logic clearly to technical and non technical audiences
Willingness and ability to work hands on with modern data and analytics tools
Comfort operating in ambiguity, learning new technologies quickly, and making defensible judgment calls

Nice To Haves

Experience supporting underwriting or product pricing platforms
Experience with involvement in system migrations, platform modernization, or scaling analytical tools
Experience mentoring analysts or acting as a technical actuarial lead
Familiarity with API based systems and service oriented architectures
Demonstrated openness to adopting new tools, workflows, and AI assisted development

Responsibilities

Own and maintain the Actuarial Relativity Calculator (ARC) and related pricing logic that translates plan design into cost relationships
Apply actuarial judgment to complex plan design features, including deductibles, coinsurance, copays, out of pocket limits, tiered networks, and variations such as per admit vs per day vs per occurrence cost sharing, with a deep understanding of how benefit structures translate into expected claims cost, relativities, and behavioral impact
Clearly explain why pricing behaves the way it does, balancing speed, rigor, and practical precision in a business environment
Assess impacts, trade offs, and edge cases, and influence decisions with clear logic and analysis
Serve as actuarial owner for production Dynamic Pricing releases and integrations
Lead actuarial UAT efforts, including reviewing model behavior, validating compliance logic, resolving unsupported plan scenarios, and making real time judgment calls
Partner closely with Product, Underwriting, Engineering, and platform teams to align actuarial intent with system behavior
Support go lives, stabilization, and defect resolution for pricing tools used broadly across the organization
Work directly with modern data and analytics tools, including Snowflake, Databricks, SQL, Python, R, VBA, Power Query, Power BI, and related platforms
Collaborate with engineering teams on API driven workflows, including understanding specifications (eg, Swagger/OpenAPI) and how actuarial logic is exposed through services
Use GitHub and VS Code for version controlled development and review of actuarial logic embedded in code
Actively leverage AI tools (eg, Microsoft Copilot, GitHub Copilot) to improve productivity, communication, and development efficiency
Review, stress test, and validate AI assisted outputs critically — knowing when AI accelerates good decisions and when it introduces risk
Think like a system architect: anticipate edge cases, failure modes, and unintended consequences that automated solutions may miss
Contribute actuarial leadership to modernization initiatives, including pricing APIs, portfolio grid evolution, and AV/MV logic integration
Help retire manual overrides and ad hoc adjustments through sound actuarial design and automation
Ensure pricing logic remains auditable, transparent, and consistent as tools and technologies evolve