Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Optum is a healthcare innovation organization that develops solutions using data analytics, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity to improve the health system. The Principal AI/ML Platform Engineer will serve as the AI Architect for enterprise hybrid AI infrastructure, defining reference architectures, optimizing training and inference platforms, managing costs, and enforcing HIPAA, security, and data-governance standards.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end reference architecture for multi-tenant AI compute platforms across hybrid on-premises bare-metal OpenShift AI clusters and public-cloud managed AI platforms (Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, GCP Vertex AI)
- Set network, latency, and topology standards for distributed training (NVLink, InfiniBand, RoCEv2, GPUDirect RDMA, NCCL), ensuring interconnect boundaries are strictly maintained
- Establish cluster governance, GitOps workflows (Argo CD), RHACM policies, and automated lifecycle management for bare-metal accelerated compute nodes
- Design cost and utilization models including capex amortization, accelerator-sharing strategies (MIG/time-slicing), and cost-per-token/training-run math to inform accelerator procurement roadmaps
- Standardize model-serving platforms (vLLM, KServe) and inference gateways, setting quantization policies, provenance review gates, and intelligent model routing rules
- Define workload placement frameworks to determine self-hosted versus managed cloud deployment based on data residency, latency, cost, and compliance requirements
- Design and enforce identity, access, and security controls for AI workloads and autonomous agents, including least-privilege RBAC, Vault secret management, short-lived credentials, and mTLS
- Establish enterprise Service Level Objectives (SLOs), disaster recovery plans, and upgrade strategies for OpenShift, OpenShift AI, GPU operators, drivers, and firmware
- Partner with cross-functional AI teams, LLM gateway engineers, privacy, and security stakeholders to ensure seamless integration and HIPAA compliance
Skills
- • Bachelor's degree or 4+ years of equivalent software/platform engineering experience in lieu of a degree
- • 10+ years of experience in infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or ML platform engineering
- • 5+ years of experience operating Kubernetes or OpenShift at scale in production bare-metal or enterprise cloud environments
- • 3+ years of experience designing and managing accelerated-compute (AI/GPU) infrastructure utilizing NVIDIA GPU Operator, NFD, MIG/time-slicing, and DCGM
- • 3+ years of experience architecting hybrid AI platforms spanning self-hosted IaaS and public-cloud PaaS managed AI services (e.g., Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, or GCP Vertex AI)
- • 3+ years of experience with HPC/AI networking technologies, including InfiniBand or RoCEv2, GPUDirect RDMA, and NCCL collective communication limits
- • 3+ years of experience managing multi-cluster fleets using RHACM (or equivalent) and GitOps tooling (Argo CD or Flux)
- • 3+ years of experience implementing enterprise security and IAM controls for software workloads (RBAC, OIDC/OAuth, Vault secrets management, mTLS)
- • Experience with distributed training frameworks (PyTorch DDP/FSDP, DeepSpeed, Ray, JAX) and batch scheduling systems (Kueue, Volcano)
- • Hands-on experience with LLM inference serving technologies (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, KServe) and platform tooling such as OpenShift AI (RHOAI) or Kubeflow pipelines
- • Experience with high-performance parallel storage systems (Ceph/ODF, Lustre, IBM Storage Scale, VAST, WEKA)
- • Active Red Hat certifications (e.g., Red Hat Certified Architect / RHCA) or open-source contributions to CNCF, OpenShift, or AI infrastructure projects
- • Experience operating AI/ML platforms within regulated healthcare environments under HIPAA and UHG data privacy controls
Benefits
- Flexible remote work from anywhere within the U.S.; hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area are required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week.
- Comprehensive benefits package.
- Incentive and recognition programs.
- Equity stock purchase.
- 401k contribution.
- Development for other roles you may be interested in.
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