Lead AI/ML Engineer - Digital Experience - Remote

UnitedHealth Group•Eden Prairie, MN

1d•$145,500 - $249,500•Remote

About The Position

Optum Tech is seeking a Lead AI/ML Engineer to design, build, and operationalize AI capabilities that support decision-making, productivity, and innovation across the Enterprise Finance organization. The role leads development of AI-powered solutions such as large language model applications, retrieval-augmented generation, intelligent agents, classification models, summarization workflows, and decision-support tools. The engineer partners with Finance, Data Engineering, Architecture, Security, and Responsible AI teams to deliver trusted, scalable, and governed solutions aligned with enterprise engineering practices and productization standards. The position is remote from anywhere in the United States. Employees hired in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area must work in the office at least four days per week. Remote employees must follow UnitedHealth Group’s Telecommuter Policy. The role offers an annual salary range of $145,500 to $249,500 for full-time employment, plus benefits and incentive programs, subject to eligibility requirements.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related technical field, or equivalent experience, such as 4 or more years of relevant software or AI engineering experience in lieu of a degree.
At least 5 years of experience in software engineering, machine learning, or AI engineering.
At least 3 years of experience with cloud-native architectures, APIs, data platforms, and scalable software systems.
At least 2 years of hands-on experience building and deploying generative AI and LLM-based applications in production environments.
At least 2 years of experience with prompt engineering, RAG architectures, AI agents, model evaluation, and operational AI governance.
Demonstrated experience applying Responsible AI, security, privacy, and compliance practices in enterprise software systems.

Nice To Haves

At least 1 year of experience developing and deploying agentic AI solutions.
Experience supporting Finance, FP&A, Accounting, Treasury, Tax, or other enterprise finance functions.
Familiarity with AI observability, model monitoring, vector databases, semantic search, and knowledge retrieval systems.
Experience leading enterprise AI products from initial design through production support.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions to address complex business challenges, emphasizing responsible AI use.
Design AI solution architectures aligned with business objectives, risk tolerance, and governance requirements.
Build and deploy LLM workflows, prompt orchestration chains, agent-based solutions, RAG applications, model integrations, classification models, and decision-support capabilities.
Develop prompt strategies, grounding approaches, tool-calling patterns, guardrails, and fallback mechanisms to improve solution quality and reliability.
Evaluate emerging technical trends to inform solution design, platform capabilities, and strategic innovation.
Use enterprise-approved AI tools to streamline workflows, automate tasks, and drive continuous improvement.
Partner with Data Engineering teams to ensure access to trusted, governed, high-quality data sources.
Establish evaluation frameworks, test datasets, scoring rubrics, and model-performance benchmarks.
Monitor and optimize output quality, relevance, accuracy, consistency, latency, cost efficiency, and hallucination risk.
Support production readiness through observability, monitoring, model evaluation, and drift detection practices, and document solution behavior and controls.