Interested in this AI/ML Engineer role at Optum?
Apply Now →Skills & Technologies
About This Role
Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Join us in making healthcare work better for everyone through people-led, responsible AI while Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
As the Senior Principal AI/ML Engineer for GTS, you will drive the architectural vision, technical design, and hands-on delivery of scalable, resilient, and secure software and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) solutions that support healthcare applications and workflows. Combining deep software engineering expertise with applied AI/ML engineering, you will build cloud-native services, reusable components, and robust application programming interfaces (APIs) alongside machine learning models, generative AI solutions, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and AI agents that enable workflow automation and decision-making.
You will advance the adoption of AI-powered development tools and cloud AI services, establish reusable engineering patterns, and develop automated pipelines for model evaluation, deployment, and monitoring. Your solutions will meet security, reliability, scalability, and responsible AI expectations. You will own complex technical initiatives from experimentation through production, resolve architectural challenges across teams, and partner with product, data, security, and business leaders to translate priorities into measurable outcomes.
In this senior individual contributor role, you will remain actively involved in coding, prototyping, and technical reviews while mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction across GTS. You will provide leadership through deep expertise and cross-team collaboration rather than direct people management.
You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Define architecture for complex initiatives spanning multiple teams. Turn business needs into technical designs, phased delivery plans, and measurable quality goals while resolving dependencies, technical risks, and competing design priorities
- Design and build distributed, cloud-native services, robust APIs, reusable libraries, and shared platforms. Establish integration contracts and engineering patterns that teams can adopt across healthcare applications and workflows
- Create working prototypes, evaluate design alternatives, and lead technical and code reviews. Improve testability, maintainability, and automated unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing
- Build reliable data integrations and event-driven workflows. Address data quality, schema evolution, failure recovery, and access controls across application, enterprise, and AI data sources
- Advance continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), infrastructure as code (IaC), and automated security and quality checks. Create repeatable deployment patterns with controlled releases, rollback paths, and clear operational readiness criteria
- Own production readiness and ongoing technical health. Define service-level objectives, observability, alerts, and runbooks; diagnose incidents, lead root-cause analysis, and implement improvements that prevent recurrence
- Optimize performance, scalability, resilience, and cloud cost. Apply secure design, least-privilege access, secrets management, and threat modeling while balancing delivery speed with long-term reliability
- Influence technical roadmaps and engineering standards across GTS. Document architectural decisions, guide platform reuse, and mentor engineers through pairing, design discussions, and reviews without direct management responsibilities
- Develop and integrate machine learning and large language model (LLM) solutions, including generative AI, RAG, and vector retrieval. Select approaches based on workflow needs, data readiness, accuracy, latency, cost, and operational constraints
- Build AI agents with orchestration, tool calling, and guardrails. Define permission boundaries, validate tool inputs and outputs, prevent prompt injection and unintended data exposure, and provide human review for consequential actions
- Establish model, prompt, and retrieval evaluations using representative datasets and clear acceptance criteria. Compare AI solutions with simpler baselines; assess factual grounding, task success, bias, safety, and failure modes before release
- Implement machine learning and LLM operations (MLOps/LLMOps) pipelines. Version models, prompts, datasets, and retrieval configurations; automate deployment, monitor quality and drift, and support traceable releases and rollbacks
- Guide adoption of AI-powered development tools and cloud AI services through hands-on trials and reusable patterns. Measure engineering value, validate generated code, and maintain testing, security, and intellectual property safeguards
- Partner with product, data, security, and business leaders on responsible AI delivery. Protect sensitive data, assess privacy and bias risks, define human oversight and fallback behavior, and resolve cross-team risks from experimentation through production
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:
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, software engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience
- 15+ years of relevant engineering experience, including 10+ years of hands-on software engineering and 6+ years delivering production AI/ML solutions
- Hands-on depth in cloud-native architecture, automated testing, CI/CD, IaC, observability, secure design, performance tuning, and production incident resolution
- Demonstrated ability to integrate and evaluate ML and LLM solutions, including generative AI, RAG, and agents, and to implement deployment, versioning, monitoring, and responsible AI controls
- Demonstrated delivery of complex, production-grade distributed services, APIs, data integrations, and reusable platforms, with strong coding skills in Python and at least one additional general-purpose language
- Evidence of cross-team technical leadership on ambiguous initiatives: influencing architecture and roadmaps, resolving dependencies and risks, mentoring engineers, and explaining trade-offs clearly to technical and business audiences
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience with healthcare applications, clinical or administrative workflows, sensitive health data, or other regulated environments
- Experience with one or more major cloud platforms and managed AI services, such as Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud
- Experience with relevant tools such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, agent orchestration frameworks, vector databases, containers, and Kubernetes; equivalent technologies are welcome
- Experience scaling shared engineering or AI platforms across teams, conducting rigorous offline and online evaluations, or measuring the impact of AI-assisted development
- All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy.
Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer benefits such as, a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). No matter where or when you begin a career with us, you'll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $184,600 - $316,500 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.
Application Deadline: This will be posted for a minimum of 2 business days or until a sufficient candidate pool has been collected. Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.
At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. Together, we are shaping the future of healthcare by harnessing technology and innovation to make care simpler to navigate, more affordable and more connected for the people we serve. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcomed, valued, heard and respected, empowering people to bring their authentic selves to work and strengthening our collective impact through diverse talents, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.
UnitedHealth Group and its affiliated brands are an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.
UnitedHealth Group and its affiliated brands are a drug-free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.
Salary Context
This $184K-$316K range is above the 75th percentile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $178K across 1623 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 76% of the market. At Optum, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $211,950 based on 13,048 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $229,300. This role's midpoint ($250K) sits 18% above the category median. Disclosed range: $184K to $316K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Safety ($256,000) and Research Engineer ($252,000). By seniority level: Entry: $111,000; Mid: $193,200; Senior: $229,300; Director: $272,300; VP: $235,830.
Optum AI Hiring
Optum has 38 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer, AI Software Engineer, AI Product Manager, Data Scientist. Positions span Boston, MA, US, Minnetonka, MN, Dublin, County Dublin, Ireland. Compensation range: $163K - $343K.
Remote Work Context
Remote AI roles pay a median of $188,000 across 2,316 positions. About 6% of all AI roles offer remote work.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 9,079 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 106 entry-level, 4,384 mid-level, 3,343 senior, and 1,246 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 6% of the market (531 positions). The remaining 8,478 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $213,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $263,911. The 90th percentile reaches $318,400. Highest-paying categories: AI Safety ($256,000 median, 66 roles); Research Engineer ($252,000 median, 457 roles); AI Engineering Manager ($251,622 median, 55 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 9,079 open positions across 16 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (6,862), AI Product Manager (453), AI Software Engineer (451). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (106) are outnumbered by mid-level (4,384) and senior (3,343) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 1,246 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 6% of all AI roles (531 positions), with 8,478 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $213,000. Top-quartile roles start at $263,911, and the 90th percentile reaches $318,400. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Safety roles lead at $256,000 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $141,440. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Python (1,649 postings), Aws (898 postings), Azure (723 postings), Rag (671 postings), Gcp (536 postings), Pytorch (434 postings), Claude (410 postings), Kubernetes (406 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
Get Weekly AI Career Intelligence
Salary data, skills demand, and market signals from 16,000+ AI job postings. Every Monday.