Lead AI​/ML Engineer - Remote

Job d:

Location:

Eden Prairie, Minnesota, United States Salary: $145,500 - $249,500/year

Job Area:
Technology Company:
United Health Group 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.

This is a high-impact technical leadership role within the Optum Tech AI Transformation team, supporting key enterprise initiatives such as the Real-Time AI Underwriting platform. You will own the technical direction and people leadership for a squad of AI/ML engineers, driving strategic engineering efforts. Beyond building, you will lead, mentor, govern, and ensure that everything your team delivers meets the highest standards of quality, compliance, and Responsible AI.

You'll serve as a bridge between engineering execution and leadership vision, ensuring AI investments translate into measurable, production-grade business outcomes.

You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely
* from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges.

Primary Responsibilities:

Design, develop, and deploy production-grade AI-powered solutions-spanning classical ML, Generative AI (LLMs, RAG, Graph RAG), and multi-agent orchestration frameworks-to address complex business challenges with emphasis on responsible and secure AI practices

Own the end-to-end AI/ML technical roadmap, defining architectural direction, choosing optimal technologies, and establishing engineering and coding standards for the team's portfolio

Use enterprise-approved AI tools to streamline workflows, automate tasks, and drive continuous improvement across the development lifecycle, optimizing team productivity and operational efficiency

Evaluate emerging trends and technologies (such as Agentic AI, foundation models, fine-tuning, and enterprise AI tooling) to inform high-quality solution design and strategic innovation

Drive MLOps maturity across development pipelines, overseeing model versioning, CI/CD for ML, retraining automation, drift detection, and production monitoring

Ensure compliance and ethical governance by aligning solutions with enterprise policies, Responsible AI principles, and data privacy regulations (HIPAA/PHI handling)
Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 5-10 direct/indirect AI/ML engineers, setting clear goals, conducting regular 1:1s, and fostering a high-performance, self-managed culture

Own and conduct robust technical reviews (architecture, design, and code reviews) to enforce rigorous standards, security posture, and pythonic best practices

You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

Required Qualifications:

10+ years of software development experience with a strong engineering and architecture foundation2+ years of hands-on experience in AI/ML project implementation (full lifecycle from ideation, data analysis, model development through production deployment)
Hands-on experience with NLP (text processing, embeddings, transformers, NER, text classification, or conversational AI)

Working experience with GenAI (RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, LLM integration, fine-tuning techniques like LoRA, and enterprise…