Director, Data Science — Remote/Hybrid AI Leader

UnitedHealth Group; Eden Prairie (MN); Hybrid; USD 135,000 - 231,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits package

Equity stock purchase

401k contribution

Job summary

UnitedHealth Group's Optum Tech team seeks a senior data scientist and AI lead to define enterprise data science strategy, drive applied machine learning across healthcare use cases, and mentor other data scientists.

This role focuses on building production ML and GenAI systems, establishing standards, ensuring responsible AI, and collaborating with engineering, product, and security to align with enterprise platforms.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience in data science, machine learning, or advanced analytics with 8+ years developing and deploying production ML models.
• 8+ years of experience using Python-based data science ecosystems and advanced SQL for large-scale analytics, experimentation, and data transformation.
• 7+ years of experience in senior data science or technical leadership roles influencing modeling approaches, reviewing analytical work across teams, setting standards for model development and validation, and translating complex technical tradeoffs for senior stakeholders.
• 6+ years of experience designing, deploying, or supporting production ML systems, including model serving, monitoring, retraining workflows, experimentation frameworks, ML lifecycle management, and evaluation of LLM or GenAI applications.
• 6+ years of experience working with healthcare data such as claims, EHR, pharmacy, or laboratory datasets, familiarity with ICD CPT NDC SNOMED LOINC, and data interoperability standards like FHIR or HL7.
• 3+ years of experience designing, building, or operationalizing Generative AI or LLM-based systems.
• 3+ years of experience applying data science, machine learning, analytics, or AI techniques to healthcare program integrity, payment integrity, fraud, waste, and abuse use cases.
• 1+ years of experience with Agentic AI concepts and implementations; remote work policy applies

Responsibilities

• Define enterprise data science strategy: Own and drive the technical strategy for applied ML, GenAI, Agentic AI, and advanced analytics across domains and healthcare use cases.
• Lead development of advanced ML, GenAI, and agentic solutions: Provide hands-on technical direction for design, development, and deployment of ML, deep learning, time-series, survival analysis, LLM, and agent-based AI systems in production.
• Establish modeling standards and best practices: Define and standardize modeling frameworks, feature engineering, prompt/context engineering, evaluation methodologies, and validation standards across data science teams.
• Architect scalable ML and GenAI systems: Guide the design of production-grade ML and LLM systems including data pipelines, feature stores, RAG, model serving, agent orchestration, monitoring, and retraining workflows.
• Ensure responsible and reliable AI deployment: Implement practices for interpretability, bias assessment, guardrails, human oversight, and lifecycle management across deployed AI systems.
• Oversee experimentation and performance monitoring: Define experimentation, benchmarking, and monitoring strategies including drift detection, LLM evaluation, and safety checks.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship: Mentor principal and senior data scientists, review designs and modeling decisions, guide GenAI and agentic AI challenges.
• Influence cross-functional AI delivery: Partner with engineering, data, security, product, and platform teams to align data science with enterprise platforms and governance expectations.
• Translate business problems into AI solutions: Work with stakeholders to map issues like overpayment detection and coding validation into scalable AI analytics solutions.

Skills

Data science leadership

Python & SQL

Production ML systems

Healthcare data

GenAI/LLM expertise

Model governance

Tools

Python (Pandas NumPy scikit-learn)

PyTorch

Job description

UnitedHealth Group's Optum Tech team seeks a senior data scientist and AI lead to define enterprise data science strategy, drive applied machine learning across healthcare use cases, and mentor other data scientists.

This role focuses on building production ML and GenAI systems, establishing standards, ensuring responsible AI, and collaborating with engineering, product, and security to align with enterprise platforms.