Principal Data Scientist - Optum COVE

UnitedHealth Group•Eden Prairie, MN

8d•Hybrid

About The Position

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. Optum COVE is a fast‑advancing enterprise capability designed to predict, identify, and resolve the moments that matter most in the consumer experience. By blending AI‑powered sensing tools, real‑time monitoring, and enterprise‑wide performance insights, the team surfaces abrasion signals early and drives rapid action to remove friction for our consumers. Working closely with partners across Operations, Tech, Product, and the Consumer Office, COVE coordinates an integrated response that ensures issues are addressed swiftly and consistently. Joining COVE means shaping a future where proactive, data‑driven experience management becomes a competitive advantage for Optum. The role will be responsible for strategic interpretation of data and business requirements to provide executive leadership and the growth with customer centric data driven insights and data solutions. Working in collaboration with Director, key stakeholders and other data scientists team members, this role works to identify new business requirements across the organization, translate business requirements into data models, perform data engineering to combine diverse data sets, and develop custom algorithms for predictive models to support the Growth business.

Requirements

10+ years of programming experience in Python or R, SQL or other data manipulation tools to query data and draw insights from large data sets
10+ years of experience in statistical or machine learning techniques including regression, natural language processing algorithms, classification and clustering, time-series forecasting and predictive/prescriptive modeling
5+ years of experience providing data driven solutions, predictive models, reports, or recommendations within a business environment. This can include previous work in data science teams, business intelligence, financial reporting or analytics environments
Model Implementation and Deployment - Python and Gen AI experience
Experience with Generative AI and cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, etc.)
Experience with real/near real time analytics
Experience with anomaly detection
End to End Development - data preprocessing, feature engineering, training, deployment, maintenance, and monitoring
Data preprocessing including combining datasets across multiple domains like calls to claims
Performance and cost optimization of models
Research and Innovation – someone who is not only technically skilled but can use business context to drive innovation
Collaboration – can work with other technical folks and is able to explain outcomes/challenges to people from the business

Nice To Haves

Healthcare data experience
Experience in Data modeling and Data Engineering
Proven ability to work on multiple projects across functional teams
Python mastery

Responsibilities

Work with key business stakeholders to develop business solutions based on data driven insights to solve complex business problems
Lead projects that combine diverse customer data sets to identify trends and opportunities, develop custom machine learning models, and provide recommendations to optimize the business and address data-related problems
Coordinate with different functional teams to improve customer data architecture, ensure accuracy of model output and implement new data gathering processes
Create customized summaries, business presentations and documentation for internal business clients based on the results of research
Motivates and inspires other team members