Senior AI/ML Engineer

UnitedHealth Group•Eden Prairie, MN

1d•$120,100 - $214,500•Remote

About The Position

Optum is seeking a Senior AI/ML Engineer to design, build, and operationalize AI capabilities for its Enterprise Finance organization. The role develops AI-powered solutions—including large language model applications, retrieval-augmented generation, intelligent agents, classification models, summarization workflows, and decision-support tools—to support enterprise decision-making, productivity, and innovation. The engineer partners with Finance, Data Engineering, Architecture, Security, Responsible AI, and other teams to deliver trusted, scalable, governed solutions aligned with enterprise engineering practices and productization standards. This position may be performed remotely from anywhere in the United States, subject to UnitedHealth Group’s Telecommuter Policy. The role supports production readiness and ongoing operations through evaluation, observability, monitoring, and continuous improvement. The stated annual salary range is $120,100–$214,500 for full-time employment, with compensation dependent on factors including labor market, education, experience, and certifications.

Requirements

At least 3 years of experience in software engineering, machine learning, or AI engineering.
At least 2 years of experience with cloud-native architectures, APIs, and scalable software systems.
At least 1 year of hands-on experience building and deploying generative AI and LLM-based applications in production environments.

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or a related field.
Experience supporting Finance, FP&A, Accounting, Treasury, Tax, or related enterprise corporate functions.
At least 1 year of experience developing and deploying agentic AI solutions.
Familiarity with AI observability, model monitoring, vector databases, semantic search, and knowledge retrieval systems.
Demonstrated experience taking enterprise AI products end-to-end from initial design through production support.
At least 2 years of experience with prompt engineering, RAG architectures, model evaluation, and operational AI governance.
At least 1 year of demonstrated experience implementing Responsible AI, data security, privacy, and compliance practices in technical solutions.

Responsibilities

Design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions and architectures, including LLM workflows, prompt orchestration chains, agent-based solutions, RAG applications, and decision-support capabilities.
Develop prompt strategies, grounding approaches, tool-calling patterns, guardrails, and fallback mechanisms to improve solution quality, safety, and reliability.
Partner with Data Engineering teams to establish and maintain access to trusted, governed, high-quality enterprise data sources.
Establish evaluation frameworks, test datasets, scoring rubrics, and model-performance benchmarks for AI deliverables.
Monitor and optimize production-system output quality, relevance, accuracy, consistency, latency, cost efficiency, and hallucination risk.
Conduct failure-mode analysis and implement continuous improvements to AI systems and automated workflows.
Collaborate with Quality Engineering, Responsible AI, Security, Privacy, Compliance, and Enterprise Architecture teams.
Document AI solution behaviors, limitations, risk controls, and operational monitoring requirements.
Support production readiness through observability, system monitoring, model evaluation, and drift detection.
Evaluate emerging AI trends, methodologies, and enterprise-approved tools to inform solution design, streamline workflows, and drive strategic innovation.