Lead AI/ML Engineer (Remote) – Healthcare Tech Impact

Optum; Washington (District of Columbia); Remote; USD 113,000 - 193,000; Full time

Job summary

Optum is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to drive the design, development, and deployment of enterprise-grade AI and ML solutions within a cloud-native, scalable architecture.

You will lead cross-functional teams across engineering, data science, and business to deliver responsible AI capabilities and robust MLOps pipelines, while mentoring staff and ensuring security and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• -10+ years of experience in Software Engineering building scalable applications.
• -5+ years with distributed computing frameworks like Spark with PySpark/Scala.
• -5+ years of data engineering concepts and SQL/NoSQL/Vector databases.
• -4+ years Python programming.
• -4+ years of CI/CD and automated deployment practices.
• -3+ years with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) and containers.
• -3+ years IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation).
• -1+ years AI tools usage (e.g., GitHub Copilot).
• -1+ years AI/ML production experience.

Responsibilities

• Lead end-to-end design, development, deployment of production-grade AI/ML solutions.
• Build scalable cloud-based AI/ML systems and data pipelines for batch and real-time workloads.
• Establish and drive MLOps practices including data ingestion, feature engineering, model training, and monitoring.
• Define architecture roadmaps and SOPs aligned with reliability, security, and cost efficiency.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across cloud, AI/ML, and data engineering teams.
• Establish data governance and quality validation in compliance with security/privacy.
• Collaborate with product, data scientists, and stakeholders to translate requirements into AI capabilities.
• Evaluate emerging AI tools to improve workflows and reduce technical debt.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed computing

Data engineering

Python

CI/CD

Databricks

Cloud environments

IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation)

AI/ML engineering

Leadership

Education

Master's degree preferred

Tools

Git

Databricks

Job description

Optum is seeking a Lead Software Engineer to drive the design, development, and deployment of enterprise-grade AI and ML solutions within a cloud-native, scalable architecture.

You will lead cross-functional teams across engineering, data science, and business to deliver responsible AI capabilities and robust MLOps pipelines, while mentoring staff and ensuring security and cost efficiency.