AI Platform Lead / Senior AI Platform Leader

UnitedHealth 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.

You will join a collaborative AI Platform team building a payer-focused agentic platform that orchestrates data, models, and workflows to support complex healthcare operations. In this role, you will provide critical onshore leadership for AI platform execution and forward 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, while ensuring our production systems are reliable, scalable, and continuously improving.

By applying AI to agentic workflows, deployment automation, and production observability in customer environments, you will help accelerate delivery, reduce risk, enable platform reuse, and drive repeatable revenue. We have the data and resources to make an impact on a massive scale; when our solutions are deployed, they process millions of clinical data elements and benefit millions of patients. We are a globally distributed and diverse organization with a shared passion to improve patient outcomes, enhance healthcare operations, and streamline payments. We pay close attention to detail to ensure we deliver high quality, the first time.

Primary 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
• Comply with all applicable Company policies, procedures, and business directives, changes including those relating to work location, team assignments, work schedules, and flexible work arrangements.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree or Masters 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 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
• 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 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
• 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)

Preferred Qualifications:

• 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

At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone-of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income-deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes - an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.