Data Scientist

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 inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health optimization on a global scale. Join us to start

Caring. Connecting. Growing together. We are looking for a Senior Data Scientist with 5-8 years of experience to lead the design and development of scalable AI systems, with deep expertise in NLP, LLM architectures, and Generative AI.

Primary Responsibilities

• Architect and develop large-scale LLM-based systems
• Design and implement advanced RAG pipelines and multi-agent AI systems
• Lead development of document intelligence solutions including OCR and structured data extraction
• Drive end-to-end ML lifecycle including problem definition, modeling, deployment, and monitoring
• Establish and enforce best practices for MLOps and CI/CD pipelines
• Conduct and scale proof-of-concepts into production systems
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business requirements into AI solutions
• Mentor junior data scientists and conduct technical reviews
• Ensure performance optimization, scalability, and reliability of AI systems
• 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

• Programming and System Design + Proven experience in designing scalable AI/ML systems + Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and distributed systems + Solid programming expertise in Python with production-level experience
• AI/ML and Generative AI + Hands-on experience with RAG architectures and agentic AI systems + Hands-on experience with vector databases such as Pinecone, FAISS, ChromaDB, or Azure AI Search + Hands-on experience with PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face, or related deep learning frameworks + Experience in optimizing LLM performance + Experience with fine-tuning, evaluation, and optimization of LLMs for enterprise use cases + Experience building and orchestrating autonomous AI agents capable of reasoning, planning, and tool execution + Experience with agent orchestration frameworks such as LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or MCP + Experience designing scalable multi-agent workflows and AI orchestration systems + Experience optimizing AI systems for latency, throughput, scalability, and cost efficiency + Experience deploying production-grade AI/ML solutions in cloud environments + Understanding of prompt engineering, guardrails, AI safety, and hallucination mitigation techniques + Understanding of AI application architecture patterns for enterprise-scale systems + Solid understanding of transformer architectures and LLM internals + Solid understanding of Machine Learning fundamentals including supervised and unsupervised learning, model evaluation, and feature engineering + Familiarity with AI observability, model monitoring, and evaluation pipelines for GenAI systems + Familiarity with semantic search, embeddings, reranking, and retrieval optimization techniques + Deep expertise in NLP and deep learning
• Document Intelligence + Experience in extracting structured information from unstructured sources + Solid experience with OCR pipelines and document layout analysis
• Cloud and MLOps + Experience deploying scalable solutions in cloud environments + Solid experience with Azure AI/ML services + Expertise in CI/CD pipelines, MLOps frameworks, and model monitoring 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.