Sr AI/ML Scientist - Remote

About the position 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. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together. Optum AI is UnitedHealth Group’s enterprise AI team. We are AI/ML scientists and engineers with deep expertise in AI/ML engineering for health care. We develop AI/ML solutions for the highest impact opportunities across UnitedHealth Group businesses including UnitedHealthcare, Optum Financial, Optum Health, Optum Insight, and Optum Rx. In addition to transforming the health care journey through responsible AI/ML innovation, our charter also includes developing and supporting an enterprise AI/ML development platform. 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. Optum AI team members: Have impact at scale: We have the data and resources to make an impact at scale. When our solutions are deployed, they have the potential to make health care system work better for everyone Do ground-breaking work: Many of our current projects involve cutting edge ML, NLP and LLM techniques. Generative AI methods for working with structured and unstructured health care data are continuously being developed and improved. We are working in one of the most important frontiers of AI/ML research and development Partner with world-class experts on innovative solutions: Our team members are developing novel AI/ML solutions to business challenges. In some cases, this includes the opportunity to file patents and publish papers about the methods we develop. We also collaborate with AI/ML researchers at some of the world’s top universities

Responsibilities

• Develop novel AI strategies to drive complex healthcare solutions by building machine learning, deep learning, and Generative AI models using cutting-edge methods
• Research, design, and implement scalable innovative machine learning models to support production processes, including processing and transforming source data for machine learning pipelines in cloud environments
• Evaluate emerging trends to inform solution design and drive strategic innovation across the enterprise
• Design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions to address complex business challenges with an emphasis on the responsible and ethical use of AI
• Collaborate with research, engineering, and product teams to translate cutting-edge AI advancements into scalable, production-ready capabilities that can be re-used by the enterprise
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to determine the applicability of AI to specific business problems
• Demonstrate self-driven initiative by taking ownership of projects and creating end-to-end solutions
• Develop comprehensive model and code documentations, as well as publications and patents for scientific journals and conferences

Requirements

• PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related quantitative field
• 3+ years of experience using machine learning to solve problems in natural language processing (NLP), generative AI, architecture design, prompt engineering, RAG, and fine-tuning LLMs
• 3+ years of experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch and TensorFlow
• Record of publications in prominent research journals and conferences

Nice-to-haves

• Familiarity with advanced document parsing methods
• Experience in developing and maintaining end-to-end ML pipelines
• Ability to mentor other researchers and engineers in AI/ML advancements
• Experience collaborating with academic researchers on innovative solutions
• Familiarity with healthcare data sets and specific industry challenges

Benefits

• a comprehensive benefits package
• incentive and recognition programs
• equity stock purchase
• 401k contribution