Lead Software Engineer - AI or ML ML Ops

Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The work you do with our team will directly improve health outcomes by connecting people with the care, pharmacy benefits, data and resources they need to feel their best. Here, you will find a culture guided by diversity and inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health equity on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

Optum AI is chartered to drive value on high impact enterprise AI problems, democratize AI through the enterprise ML platform, accelerate the adoption of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) and drive Responsible AI. Projecting to deliver $8.4B of benefit value over the next 5 years through these efforts as well as reduce risk through safe, accurate, and unbiased AI, this is a key focus of the enterprise.

As an individual contributor, as the Lead Engineer, you will make a significant contribution to United AI Studio (UAIS) strategic pillars. You will guide and motivate a team of engineers to not only deliver products/solutions but also meet key metrics. Working in collaboration with the product owner, architects and engineers, the Lead Software Engineer, will help build UAIS.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Build tooling/infrastructure to support model hosting and DataOps/MLOps monitoring of end-to-end model inference patterns for generative and non-generative AI.
• Design and build distributed, scalable, fault tolerant software components for an enterprise multi-cloud platform (Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, AWS, GCP)
• Build and support data pipelines using big data technologies like Apache Spark, Hadoop etc.
• Build services to support batch orchestration and real-time model inference using a combination of in-house backend applications and cloud vendor offerings (AzureML, Databricks Workflows, Sagemaker, Airflow)
• Mentoring and developing other engineers on the team.
• Participate in the entire software development lifecycle - design, implementation, testing, CI/CD and production operations
• Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years of experience as a lead software engineer on production-grade systems for AI/ML
• 3+ years of experience working in AI/ML Engineering domain including MLOps
• 3+ years of hands-on experience working on distributed AI/ML systems on a cloud platform (Azure, Databricks, Snowflake, AWS preferably)
• 3+ years of experience with building data pipelines and ML/LLM inference pipelines using both distributed orchestration tools (Airflow) and hosted endpoints for both batch and near-real-time patterns
• 5+ years of demonstrable proficiency with programming languages such as Python and Java as well as querying/command line tools such as SQL, shell scripting, regex

Preferred Qualifications:

• 2+ years of experience with Data Science and Machine Learning full lifecycle as a data scientist, ML Engineer or software engineer
• Experience working with at least one relational or a NoSQL database
• Proven proponent of metrics & Engineering best practices, and demonstrable track record of addressing engineering efficiency bottlenecks
• Proven success in collaborating with geographically distributed teams

At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone–of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income–deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes — an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.