Principal AI/ML Engineer
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Eden Prairie, Minnesota, United States
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Contract
- Experience
- 5+ years
- Category
- Ml / AI
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent experience
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems
- 5+ years of experience designing distributed services and platform-level APIs consumed by other engineering teams
- Experience building or operating ML, AI or data-intensive systems in production, including responsibility for them after launch
- Hands-on experience with LLM-based or agentic systems, including retrieval-augmented generation, tool and function calling, and orchestration
- Expert-level proficiency in Python and at least one additional production language such as Go, Java, TypeScript, Scala or C++
- Demonstrated depth in software engineering fundamentals: testing strategy, debugging complex production issues, performance profiling, code review and technical documentation
- Experience with cloud-native delivery, including containers and Kubernetes, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and observability tooling
- Experience with large-scale computing frameworks and distributed data processing such as Spark/Databricks, Ray, Kafka or equivalent
- Experience building software subject to security, privacy or regulatory constraints
- Demonstrated ability to explain complex technical results and trade-offs clearly to non-technical stakeholders and senior leaders
Nice to have
- Experience building multi-tenant platforms or services, including tenant isolation, quota and entitlement enforcement, and developer experience as an explicit product concern
- Experience implementing or operating Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, tool-calling standards, or agent frameworks such as LangGraph or equivalent
- Experience with model serving and optimization at scale, including vLLM, TensorRT/Triton, batching, KV-cache strategies, quantization and multi-model routing
- Experience with vector databases, embedding lifecycle management, hybrid retrieval and enterprise knowledge graphs
- Experience with inference cost management or FinOps for AI workloads
- Experience with responsible AI practice, including bias and fairness evaluation, model risk management, model documentation, or alignment to frameworks such as the NIST AI Risk Management Framework
- Experience on a 0-to-1 product or platform, working directly with design partners or customers to shape what gets built
- Experience with Azure AI services and Databricks in a regulated enterprise environment
- Experience with healthcare data and standards: claims, EHR data, FHIR, HL7, ICD, CPT, HCPCS, SNOMED CT, LOINC, and working with PHI inside HIPAA/HITRUST boundaries
- Health care industry experience including provider, payer, medical device, pharmaceutical, or other health services a plus
Full description
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.
As a principal engineer within the enterprise AI Platforms team within the Office of AI, you will design, build and operate the platform that healthcare agents run on. This is a software engineering role at its core applied to a domain where the workloads are models, retrieval and agents. You will own systems end to end: analysis and design, coding, code review, testing and debugging, documentation, release and delivery, and the long maintenance tail after launch.
Your work is enabling Optum clients with access to an AI Platform that provides secure, PHI-ready model access and favorable inference economics, a capability gateway that makes licensed intelligence callable from any approved agent or application, and the agent harness those agents run on. You will set the engineering standards, patterns and shared utilities other teams build on, and carry meaningful influence over the technical direction of the portfolio. Expect to prototype quickly with design partners, prove or disprove technical bets with evidence, and then harden what survives into platform-grade services that other engineers can easily adopt.
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