Principal AI Architecture - Remote

About the role

Optum Tech is seeking a visionary Digital AI architect for our Contract Center Transformation. The successful candidate will play a critical role in transforming our voice and digital experiences to conversational experiences, through multiple engagement channels (including web, app, chat, voice, and search), with a particular emphasis on transforming how consumers engage in the US health care system.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end technical architecture for conversational chat and messaging systems across web, mobile, and other digital channels
• Design and implement channel-agnostic chat architectures that separate channel delivery from conversation intelligence, orchestration, and backend integrations
• Define and implement multi-bot / multi-agent orchestration patterns, including routing between deterministic flows, AI agents, domain bots, and human agents
• Design robust approaches for conversation state, memory, context propagation, and session continuity across channels, devices, and long-running customer journeys
• Establish telemetry, observability, and evaluation patterns for conversational systems, including latency, fallback rates, drop-off points, repeated questions, low-confidence signals, transcript analysis, and quality feedback loops
• Define and implement guardrails for chat systems, including policy enforcement, tool restrictions, grounding/validation patterns, escalation rules, and safe fallback behavior
• Define and implement secure integration patterns between chat systems and enterprise services such as identity, CRM, case management, customer profile, knowledge, and backend APIs
• Lead architecture reviews, publish reusable patterns and standards, mentor engineers, and influence cross-functional stakeholders across Product, Engineering, Security, and Operations
• Evaluate emerging conversational AI capabilities, frameworks, and integration patterns to improve maintainability, quality, scalability, and customer outcomes

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
• 4+ years of experience in solution architecture and/or software engineering for customer-facing chat, messaging, conversational AI, or digital customer experience platforms
• 2+ years of hands-on experience designing and implementing conversational chat systems in production, including orchestration, session handling, routing, and human handoff
• 2+ years of experience implementing conversational AI for chat, including multi-turn conversation handling, fulfillment, escalation, and fallback design
• 2+ years of experience with one or more of the following: memory/context management, multi-agent or multi-bot orchestration, grounding/guardrails, evaluation frameworks, or telemetry/quality feedback loops for conversational systems
• 1+ years of experience building or integrating customer chat experiences into web/mobile applications using APIs/SDKs, secure authentication, and session/context management patterns
• Solid experience with modern integration patterns including REST, event-driven systems, async messaging, data contracts, and error-handling patterns
• Experience with AI in engineering workflows, including standards, guardrails, reusable prompts/patterns, and evaluation/quality checks
• Strong communication skills and ability to produce architecture artifacts, lead technical workshops, mentor engineers, and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Demonstrated ability to produce architecture artifacts, lead technical workshops, mentor engineers, and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Operational mindset, including monitoring/alerting, incident support, root cause analysis, and change safety for customer-facing conversational platforms

Qualifications

• Experience designing channel-agnostic conversational systems that support consistent behavior across chat, messaging, voice, and human-assisted experiences
• Experience with LLM-based orchestration, RAG/grounding strategies, tool-calling patterns, or policy-enforced agent architectures
• Experience with asynchronous messaging patterns, resume/rejoin behavior, and long-running session continuity
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD for conversational platform delivery
• Experience partnering with UX/content/conversation design teams to improve usability, tone, containment, and resolution outcomes
• Experience operating in regulated or high-compliance environments with solid privacy, retention, and audit requirements

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with memory/context management, multi-agent or multi-bot orchestration, grounding/guardrails, evaluation frameworks, or telemetry/quality feedback loops for conversational systems
• Experience with asynchronous messaging patterns, resume/rejoin behavior, and long-running session continuity
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and CI/CD for conversational platform delivery
• Experience partnering with UX/content/conversation design teams to improve usability, tone, containment, and resolution outcomes
• Experience operating in regulated or high-compliance environments with solid privacy, retention, and audit requirements

Benefits

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).

Pay

The salary for this role will range from $112,700 - $193,200 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.

Schedule

All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy.

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.