Interested in this AI Product Manager role at Optum?
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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 in making healthcare work better for everyone through people-led, responsible AI while Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
The Sr Product Manager, AI & Product Office owns AI-enabled products that help the Chief AI & Product Officer (CAIPO) drive Optum Health's enterprise AI-enabled product strategy, Agenix solutions portfolio, and product capability agenda. Serving as strategist, builder, and owner of the outcome, this role defines the problem with the people who do the work, decides what gets built and why, and takes each product from first prototype through deployment and measurement.
This individual is accountable for measurable enterprise value: whether what shipped changed care for patients and care teams, whether it did so appropriately, and whether it earns the return required to scale. The Sr Product Manager keeps the work focused on the smallest version that can prove or disprove a bet, and brings clinical, operational, technology, and governance partners into one team rather than a chain of handoffs.
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 write, prototype, and analyze with AI tools every day, and you will be where care is delivered, not only in meetings about it.
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.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Problem Definition & Discovery + Embed with local market teams in primary care, specialty, home and community, and virtual settings to understand how care is delivered, and turn what you observe into written problem statements ranked by the people who do the work + Define, before build begins, the smallest version of a product that can prove or disprove the bet, the outcome measure that will decide it, and the business case it must meet to scale + Partner with care team members as design partners from the first conversation, not as reviewers at the end + Determine which problems belong to a single market and which belong to the enterprise, and shape each product accordingly
- Build & Delivery + Own the roadmap and backlog for your products, making tradeoffs across scope, speed, risk, and cost, and write each decision down with its reasoning and what would change it + Run the work as one team rather than a chain of handoffs, with cycle time measured in weeks + Work with the team's engineers and with great Optum Health engineering teams: set direction, write the specifications and evaluations the build is held to, and review what ships + Build prototypes, analyses, and internal tools yourself with AI coding and agent tools, and continuously improve them + Partner with finance, technology, data, security, legal, privacy, compliance, care teams, and other stakeholders to deliver products that are responsible, secure, and enterprise-ready, including through Optum Health's AI review and governance process
- Measurement & Value Realization + Define, with clinical and governance partners, what an AI feature must get right, how it is measured, the bar it must clear before it reaches users, and the bar it must clear before it takes on more autonomy + Establish baselines before launch for operational, clinical, and financial outcomes, such as access, time to care, and cost, so the change can be attributed + Measure whether each patient got the right care, not only whether a proxy metric moved + Report what changed since the last period, including results that show something did not work, and turn results into decisions to stop, change, or scale + Build the value case for scaling each product, and partner with finance to validate it
- Adoption & Scale + Develop change management and adoption plans with the deployment manager, so the people affected understand the purpose, impact, readiness requirements, and expected value of each product + Write down what the team learns each week so it is reviewed on cadence and turned into decisions + Hand proven products to scaled delivery teams, and write the playbook so the next team can stand up the same product from what is written down, without you + Raise the AI fluency of the market teams you work with, helping the people closest to the work use and build with AI safely
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:
- 7+ years of product management experience shipping software products used by operational, clinical, or frontline users
- Experience in the healthcare industry and/or within a large, complex, matrixed organization
- Experience to has shipped an AI, machine learning, or large language model feature to production and measured what it changed
- Experience to has shipped products with engineering teams both inside and beyond their own team
- Experience in 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 the analytics and presentation tools executives use
- Demonstrated business acumen: builds a business case, defines metrics, writes SQL or equivalent, and reads a rollout result without an analyst in the room
- 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
- Proven exceptional communication skills, including with executive-level audiences; solid writing: decisions, findings, and disagreements in this office are written down, so the writing is the work
- Proven ability to build cross-functional relationships at all levels of the organization and lead toward shared goals without formal authority
Preferred Qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Technology, Product Management, Healthcare, Data/Analytics, or a related field; MBA, MHA, or other advanced degree welcome
- Experience with care delivery, care coordination, patient access, or scheduling products
- Experience with electronic health record integration (Epic, athenahealth, eClinicalWorks) and healthcare data standards such as FHIR and HL7
- Experience taking an AI capability through an enterprise governance or review process in healthcare
- Experience building a zero-to-one product inside a large organization, or at an early-stage company
- Familiarity with value-based care and how care patterns affect cost and quality
Core Competencies:
- Building with AI: uses agents and automation to do the job, not only to describe it
- Problem definition and customer discovery in the field
- Product strategy and written decision-making
- Outcome measurement and evaluation of AI features
- Value realization and business case development
- Enterprise and market-level judgment
- Cross-functional partnership with care teams, operations, and technology
- Responsible AI and healthcare governance
- Change management and adoption
- Executive communication
- 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 $159,300 - $273,200 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 $159K-$273K range is above the median for AI Product Manager roles in our dataset (median: $194K across 123 roles with salary data).
View full AI Product Manager salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI Product Managers define what AI features get built and why. They translate business problems into ML-solvable tasks, work with engineering to scope model requirements, and own the metrics that determine if an AI feature is working. The role requires a rare combination of technical fluency and product instinct.
Unlike traditional product management, AI PM work involves managing uncertainty at a fundamental level. Your model might work 90% of the time. What happens the other 10%? What's the user experience when the AI is wrong? How do you measure 'good enough' for a probabilistic system? These questions don't have easy answers, and the AI PM is the person responsible for finding them.
Across the 9,079 AI roles we're tracking, AI Product Manager positions make up 5% of the market. At Optum, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
AI Product Manager roles are growing as companies realize that shipping AI features requires different product thinking than traditional software. The best candidates combine product management experience with enough technical depth to have productive conversations with ML engineers about model capabilities and limitations.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week includes: reviewing model evaluation results with the ML team, defining success metrics for a new AI feature, conducting user research on how customers respond to AI-generated outputs, writing product requirements that include accuracy thresholds and fallback behaviors, and presenting the AI roadmap to leadership. You're the translator between technical capability and business value.
AI Product Manager roles are growing as companies realize that shipping AI features requires different product thinking than traditional software. The best candidates combine product management experience with enough technical depth to have productive conversations with ML engineers about model capabilities and limitations.
Skills in Demand for This Role
Technical fluency with ML concepts is essential, though you won't be writing models. Expect to understand training data, evaluation metrics, model limitations, and responsible AI practices. SQL and basic Python are increasingly expected. Experience with A/B testing, data analysis, and product analytics is baseline. Understanding LLM capabilities and limitations is now a core requirement.
The differentiator is AI-specific product thinking: knowing when to use ML vs. heuristics, understanding the cost of training data collection, designing graceful degradation for model failures, and building products that improve with usage data. Experience with AI safety, bias mitigation, and responsible AI deployment is increasingly important.
Strong postings describe specific AI products the PM will own, mention the ML team structure, and talk about measurement methodology. Look for companies that have already shipped AI features. Roles at companies that are 'exploring AI' often mean you'll spend a year defining the strategy before any building happens.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI Product Manager roles pay a median of $220,200 based on 947 positions with disclosed compensation. Senior-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $229,300. Disclosed range: $159K to $273K.
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 Product Manager roles include Product Manager, Data Analyst, Technical Program Manager.
From here, career progression typically leads toward Director of AI Product, VP Product, Head of AI.
The most effective path is PM experience plus self-directed AI education. Take Andrew Ng's courses, build a small ML project, and learn enough Python to read model evaluation code. The goal isn't to become an ML engineer. It's to have credibility in technical conversations and to understand what's possible, what's hard, and what's a bad idea.
What to Expect in Interviews
AI interviews typically combine coding challenges (Python-focused), system design questions tailored to the role, and discussions about your experience with relevant tools and frameworks. Strong candidates demonstrate both technical depth and the ability to make pragmatic engineering tradeoffs. Prepare portfolio projects that demonstrate end-to-end capability rather than isolated skills.
When evaluating opportunities: Strong postings describe specific AI products the PM will own, mention the ML team structure, and talk about measurement methodology. Look for companies that have already shipped AI features. Roles at companies that are 'exploring AI' often mean you'll spend a year defining the strategy before any building happens.
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).
AI Product Manager roles are growing as companies realize that shipping AI features requires different product thinking than traditional software. The best candidates combine product management experience with enough technical depth to have productive conversations with ML engineers about model capabilities and limitations.
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
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