Principal AI Architect - Remote

UnitedHealth Group•Eden Prairie, MN

8h•$134,600 - $230,800•Remote

About The Position

Optum is seeking a visionary Digital AI architect for our Contract Center Transformation. The successful candidate will play a critical role in transforming our voice and digital experiences to conversational experiences, through multiple engagement channels (including web, app, chat, voice, and search), with a particular emphasis on transforming how consumers engage in the US health care system. In this role you will help make UnitedHealth Group's consumer obsessed digital vision come to life by using AI to deliver our next generation Conversational Experiences.Define and lead the strategic vision, architecture, and implementation of AI contact solutions across our consumer-facing digital experiences. Partner closely with business and product teams to identify and prioritize strategic opportunities for leveraging AI within web, mobile, chat messaging, voice messaging, and search channels. Oversee the development of scalable, secure, and innovative AI solutions designed to enhance consumer engagement and deliver personalized, intuitive self-service experiences that transform our current digital experiences into conversational experiences.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
5+ years of experience in solution architecture and/or software engineering for customer-facing chat, messaging, conversational AI, or digital customer experience platforms
3+ years of hands-on experience designing and implementing conversational chat systems in production, including orchestration, session handling, routing, and human handoff
3+ years of experience building or integrating customer chat experiences into web/mobile applications using APIs/SDKs, secure authentication, and session/context management patterns
3+ years of experience implementing conversational AI for chat, including multi-turn conversation handling, fulfillment, escalation, and fallback design
3+ years of experience with one or more of the following: memory/context management, multi-agent or multi-bot orchestration, grounding/guardrails, evaluation frameworks, or telemetry/quality feedback loops for conversational systems
Solid experience with modern integration patterns including REST, event-driven systems, async messaging, data contracts, and error-handling patterns
Experience with AI in engineering workflows, including standards, guardrails, reusable prompts/patterns, and evaluation/quality checks
Demonstrated ability to produce architecture artifacts, lead technical workshops, mentor engineers, and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders
Demonstrated operational mindset, including monitoring/alerting, incident support, root cause analysis, and change safety for customer-facing conversational platforms

Nice To Haves

Experience designing channel-agnostic conversational systems that support consistent behavior across chat, messaging, voice, and human-assisted experiences
Experience with LLM-based orchestration, RAG/grounding strategies, tool-calling patterns, or policy-enforced agent architectures
Experience with asynchronous messaging patterns, resume/rejoin behavior, and long-running session continuity
Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD for conversational platform delivery
Experience partnering with UX/content/conversation design teams to improve usability, tone, containment, and resolution outcomes
Experience operating in regulated or high-compliance environments with solid privacy, retention, and audit requirements

Responsibilities

Own the end-to-end technical architecture for conversational chat and messaging systems across web, mobile, and other digital channels
Design and implement channel-agnostic chat architectures that separate channel delivery from conversation intelligence, orchestration, and backend integrations
Define and implement multi-bot / multi-agent orchestration patterns, including routing between deterministic flows, AI agents, domain bots, and human agents
Design robust approaches for conversation state, memory, context propagation, and session continuity across channels, devices, and long-running customer journeys
Define and implement guardrails for chat systems, including policy enforcement, tool restrictions, grounding/validation patterns, escalation rules, and safe fallback behavior
Establish telemetry, observability, and evaluation patterns for conversational systems, including latency, fallback rates, drop-off points, repeated questions, low-confidence signals, transcript analysis, and quality feedback loops
Design secure integration patterns between chat systems and enterprise services such as identity, CRM, case management, customer profile, knowledge, and backend APIs
Define patterns for bot-to-agent handoff, agent context transfer, async messaging behavior, and unified customer journey continuity
Lead architecture reviews, publish reusable patterns and standards, mentor engineers, and influence cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Security, and Operations
Evaluate emerging conversational AI capabilities, frameworks, and integration patterns to improve maintainability, quality, scalability, and customer outcomes