Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. UnitedHealth Group is a global organization delivering care through technology to improve health outcomes. The Lead AI/ML Engineer will own the technical direction and leadership of a team of AI/ML engineers, driving strategic engineering efforts in AI-powered solutions and ensuring compliance with Responsible AI principles.
Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and deploy production-grade AI-powered solutions-spanning classical ML, Generative AI (LLMs, RAG, Graph RAG), and multi-agent orchestration frameworks-to address complex business challenges with emphasis on responsible and secure AI practices
- Own the end-to-end AI/ML technical roadmap, defining architectural direction, choosing optimal technologies, and establishing engineering and coding standards for the team's portfolio
- Use enterprise-approved AI tools to streamline workflows, automate tasks, and drive continuous improvement across the development lifecycle, optimizing team productivity and operational efficiency
- Evaluate emerging trends and technologies (such as Agentic AI, foundation models, fine-tuning, and enterprise AI tooling) to inform high-quality solution design and strategic innovation
- Drive MLOps maturity across development pipelines, overseeing model versioning, CI/CD for ML, retraining automation, drift detection, and production monitoring
- Ensure compliance and ethical governance by aligning solutions with enterprise policies, Responsible AI principles, and data privacy regulations (HIPAA/PHI handling)
- Lead, mentor, and develop a team of 5-10 direct/indirect AI/ML engineers, setting clear goals, conducting regular 1:1s, and fostering a high-performance, self-managed culture
- Own and conduct robust technical reviews (architecture, design, and code reviews) to enforce rigorous standards, security posture, and pythonic best practices
Skills
- 10+ years of software development experience with a strong engineering and architecture foundation
- 2+ years of hands-on experience in AI/ML project implementation (full lifecycle from ideation, data analysis, model development through production deployment)
- Hands-on experience with NLP (text processing, embeddings, transformers, NER, text classification, or conversational AI)
- Working experience with GenAI (RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, LLM integration, fine-tuning techniques like LoRA, and enterprise deployment)
- Experience or strong working knowledge of Agentic AI development (agentic workflows, tool orchestration, multi-agent systems, or planning frameworks)
- Solid Python programming skills with deep proficiency in production-grade coding, code reviews, and enforcing standards
- Driver's License and access to a reliable transportation
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related field (or equivalent professional experience)
- Experience with MLOps tooling (MLflow, Weights & Biases, Kubeflow, etc.) for experiment tracking, model registry, and automation
- Familiarity with Responsible AI frameworks (bias detection, fairness metrics, model explainability like SHAP/LIME, and adversarial red-teaming)
- Knowledge of Graph RAG, knowledge graphs, and ontology-based reasoning systems
Benefits
- Comprehensive benefits package (subject to eligibility requirements)
- Incentive and recognition programs
- Equity stock purchase
- 401k contribution (subject to eligibility requirements)
- Remote work flexibility from anywhere within the U.S. (employees working remotely required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy)
Company Overview