Service Operations Designer, AI and Product Office - Boston, MA or Remote

UnitedHealth Group•Boston, MA

1d•$112,700 - $193,200•Remote

About The Position

The Service Designer, AI & Product Office designs how care and operations change when an AI-enabled product arrives, helping the Chief AI & Product Officer (CAIPO) drive Optum Health's enterprise AI-enabled product strategy, Agenix solutions portfolio, and product capability agenda. Serving as observer, designer, and operator, this role maps how care runs today and designs the future state with the people who do the work: the roles, workflows, handoffs, and operating decisions around the software. This individual is accountable for measurable enterprise value in the operation: whether the product and the operation around it were designed together, and whether the change shows up in how care is delivered. The Service Designer turns what one market learns into a service design the next market can adapt. This is a job for a builder. The team is just starting, and you will help build it and shape how it innovates, at the highest level. The office is small today, and that is by design: its leverage is the enterprise AI investment it drives across Optum Health. You will spend real time where care is delivered, with the care teams who deliver it, and you will use AI tools to take the manual work out of observing, mapping, and synthesizing. The AI & Product Office is building a small, cross-functional product team: product management, engineering, product design, service design, deployment, and clinical, working alongside care team members from each local market team. The team embeds with a local Optum Health market team to find problems with the people who do the work, then design, build, deploy, and measure the products that fix them. What the team learns in the first market is written down as the method for the next one. 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

7+ years of experience in operations, process improvement, or service design, with significant time in care delivery settings
Experience in the healthcare industry and/or within a large, complex, matrixed organization
Experienced to design a new service or operating model with clinical or operational teams, seen it through launch, and can say what changed as a result
Experience planning and facilitating Lean, kaizen, or similar improvement events with frontline teams
Experience using AI tools in your own work today and has built with them: an agent, automation, or large language model tool you designed, built, and ran, at work or as a personal project We will ask you about it in the interview
Works as a senior individual contributor: owns hard problems end to end, working across functions to deliver them
Working proficiency in the tools this office builds with: GitHub and AI coding and agent tools, alongside process mapping and analytics tools
Demonstrated ability to work at the enterprise level and at a single market's level, and to tell which one a given decision belongs to
Demonstrated business acumen: defines operational measures, builds a baseline, and analyzes results with spreadsheets, SQL, or similar tools
Proven solid writing: decisions, findings, and disagreements in this office are written down, so the writing is the work
Proven ability to build relationships at all levels of the organization, earning trust with frontline staff and care team members as well as with operations leaders

Nice To Haves

Bachelor's degree in a related field; advanced degree welcome
Training in service design or human-centered design methods
Lean or Six Sigma certification
Experience in care delivery, care coordination, patient access, scheduling, or practice operations
Experience designing services across multiple sites or markets and adapting to local differences
Clinical or practice background, such as nursing, medical assistant, or practice management

Responsibilities

Embed with local teams to shadow and map how care is delivered today, end to end, across primary care, specialty, home and community, and virtual care, including the handoffs, systems, and points where patients drop out
Plan and facilitate kaizen events and working sessions with frontline staff, care team members, and managers to find the problems worth fixing and design the future-state workflow with them
Write down what you observe each week so it is reviewed on cadence, turned into decisions, and usable by the team and the next market's team without you in the room
Design the service blueprint around each product: roles, workflows, scripts, handoffs, staffing, and the policies that change when the product arrives
Partner with product, design, and engineering to decide what the product should do and what the operation should do
Partner with market operations leaders, practice managers, and clinical leaders on the operating decisions a new service needs, and determine which decisions belong to a single market and which belong to the enterprise
Partner with finance, technology, data, security, legal, privacy, compliance, care teams, and other stakeholders so each service design is responsible, secure, and enterprise-ready
Define the operational measures, such as access, time to care, and staff time, and establish baselines before launch so the change can be measured
Develop change management plans with the deployment manager, so the people affected understand the purpose, impact, readiness requirements, and expected value of each change
Hand the service design to the deployment manager for go-live, and stay with it through launch so what was designed is what goes live
Write the service design down so the next market can adapt it to its own operation rather than start again
Raise the AI fluency of the market teams you work with, helping the people closest to the work use and build with AI safely