Senior Manager AI/ML Engineering - Remote

UnitedHealth Group•San Francisco, CA

3d•$148,900 - $255,300•Remote

About The Position

Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation, developing cutting-edge solutions to improve health and healthcare systems. The AI Platform team is building a payer-focused agentic platform that orchestrates data, models, and workflows for complex healthcare operations. This role provides critical onshore leadership for AI platform execution and deployment across Payment Integrity and Optum Real, ensuring secure, scalable delivery of reusable AI services. The team designs and delivers intelligent, agent-driven applications that review and reason over clinical and administrative data, evaluate AI outputs, and automate decision workflows, ensuring production systems are reliable, scalable, and continuously improving. By applying AI to agentic workflows, deployment automation, and production observability, the role accelerates delivery, reduces risk, enables platform reuse, and drives repeatable revenue. Solutions deployed process millions of clinical data elements and benefit millions of patients. The organization is globally distributed and diverse, with a shared passion for improving patient outcomes, enhancing healthcare operations, and streamlining payments, emphasizing attention to detail for high-quality delivery. 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

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related quantitative field, or 4+ additional years of equivalent software engineering experience in lieu of a degree
12+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Data Science, or Analytics, with 3+ years dedicated to AI/ML engineering or related fields
3+ years of experience directly managing, coaching, and developing engineering teams of 5+ people, including senior engineers
Demonstrated experience leading and managing AI/ML projects from initial ideation and development through to customer-facing production delivery, deployment, and evaluation
Technical experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerization/orchestration tools (Docker, Kubernetes)
Experience with DevSecOps, automated CI/CD practices (e.g., Git, Jenkins), and proficiency in Python or other programming languages for data analysis and AI/ML development

Nice To Haves

Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related quantitative field
2+ years of hands-on experience with Generative AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs like OpenAI, Claude, Gemini), LangChain, AI Agents, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Databases, Prompt Engineering, and model fine-tuning
Experience applying AI to agentic workflows, deployment automation, and production observability (e.g., model monitoring, logging, and performance tracking)
Experience in establishing and enforcing AI/ML engineering best practices, design standards, and ethical guidelines
Experience in Payment Integrity, clinical operations, or healthcare claim systems
Experience managing or working with a mixed team, both onshore and offshore

Responsibilities

Provide strategic and technical leadership for AI platform execution and forward deployment across Payment Integrity and Optum Real, ensuring secure, reliable, and scalable delivery of reusable AI services
Lead and inspire a high-performing team of AI/ML engineers and senior staff, fostering a culture of trust, ownership, product quality, and consistent execution excellence while setting clear AI development goals within team plans
Champion AI as a core driver of team success, strategically designing, developing, and deploying AI-powered solutions to address complex clinical and administrative healthcare challenges and deliver measurable business value
Strategically design and deliver intelligent, agentic workflows and agent-driven applications that review and reason over clinical and administrative data in customer environments
Drive engineering and operational excellence across the full development lifecycle by applying AI to deployment automation, robust automated testing, continuous integration, and production observability in customer environments
Leverage and integrate enterprise-approved AI tools to streamline engineering workflows, automate routine developer tasks, and drive continuous operational improvement
Champion the ethical use of AI across all projects, proactively embedding transparency, fairness, and accountability throughout the entire AI lifecycle of reusable services
Partner cross-functionally with product managers, customer integration teams, senior stakeholders, and enterprise leaders to represent the engineering vision, accelerate platform reuse, and drive repeatable revenue