Lead AI/ML Engineer

Requisition Number: 2364530
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.
Join the Enterprise Technology Infrastructure Platform Services (ETIPS) team, driving innovation and reliability across core systems.
Primary Responsibilities:

• Lead the architecture, design, and delivery of production-grade Agentic AI and Generative AI platforms, including deep integration with MCP servers, LLMs, and supporting services to improve platform efficiency, automation, and overall engineering productivity
• Design, build, and operate LLM-powered capabilities such as prompt engineering, fine-tuning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), vector indexing, evaluation frameworks, and safety guardrails, ensuring solutions are secure, observable, auditable, and production-ready at enterprise scale
• Define and recommend security architectures and mitigations for agentic and AI-driven systems where mature patterns or controls do not yet exist
• Act as a technical leader and role model, writing clean, modular, testable, and well-documented code; setting engineering standards; and providing thoughtful, high-impact code reviews across the team
• Hiring talent, retain your top talent and mentor them to grow as technical leaders
• Manage span of directly & indirectly reports and responsible for their performance management
• Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

Required Qualifications:

• Master's degree or bachelor's degree in computer science or similar major
• 12+ years of experience with strong proficiency in object-oriented programming languages (e.g., Java, Go, Python, or similar), with experience building scalable, production-grade distributed systems
• Deep hands-on experience with cloud platforms like Azure, AWS or GCP and familiar with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform.
• Experience designing or operating API and gateway platforms, with knowledge of enterprise gateway solutions such as Azure API Management (APIM), Kong, Envoy, or equivalent proxy/gateway technologies
• In-depth knowledge of identity providers and authentication/authorization protocols, including OAuth 2.0 and OAuth 2.1, OpenID Connect (OIDC), JWTs, and service-to-service authentication
• Solid understanding of modern agentic and AI interaction protocols, including MCP (Model Context Protocol), A2A (Agent-to-Agent), and API/Agent-to-Platform interaction patterns, and how they are applied in real-world systems
• Proven solid security mindset and practical experience applying security best practices across distributed systems, including defense-in-depth, least privilege, auditability, and threat modeling

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building or operating LLM-based or agentic platforms, including integration with LLM providers, MCP servers, or agent orchestration frameworks
• Experience designing enterprise-scale control planes or gateways, including centralized policy enforcement, observability, and usage governance
• Familiarity with zero-trust and modern security architectures, including mTLS, short-lived credentials, workload identities, and continuous access evaluation

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.
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