Lead AI/ML Applied Scientist

About the 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. 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.

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.

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

• Build Machine Learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing the ML models
• Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of healthcare data sets to develop insights that increase business value
• Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis
• Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving
• Research and implement innovative machine learning approaches
• Mentor and help recruit AI/ML scientists and machine learning engineers to the team
• Present findings and insights to senior leadership and at internal venues
• Be the thought leader in cutting-edge AI research and proactively pursue IP submissions

Required Qualifications

• PhD in AI, computer science, data science, applied math or related technical fields
• 10+ years of industry/academic experience in machine learning or a related field
• 5+ years of building models for business application experience
• 5+ years of Python programming skills and experience with deep learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Advanced understanding of Deep Learning with applications in Speech Processing, NLP and multimodal modeling

Preferred Qualifications

• Experienced mathematical background, especially in optimization theory, stochastic algorithms, and/or numerical methods
• Experience with state-of-the-art algorithms and topologies including, but not limited to: VAR, GNNs, GANs, Transformers, deep and wide, SSMs, LLMs among others
• Proven in-depth knowledge in Generative AI technology and Large Language Models (LLM)

Pay

The salary for this role will range from $154,900 - $193,600 annually based on full-time employment.