Principal AI Data Engineer — Remote GenAI Pipelines

UnitedHealth Group; Eden Prairie (MN); Hybrid; USD 113,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits package

Incentive and recognition programs

Equity stock purchase

401k contribution

Job summary

Optum within UnitedHealth Group seeks a Principal AI Data Engineer to design end-to-end AI pipelines for large-scale unstructured data, enabling advanced analytics, Generative AI, and investigative insights. You will transform OCR-driven data into AI-ready data products and build LLM-powered systems in production.

This role sits at the intersection of data engineering and AI, focusing on modern data pipelines, production-grade AI capabilities, and collaboration across stakeholders.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience.
• 5+ years designing, building, and operating scalable data pipelines (batch + streaming).
• 2+ years deploying Generative AI solutions to production (RAG, LLM-powered pipelines).
• Hands-on development in Python and SQL, with Spark/PySpark and Databricks.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable data pipelines and platforms supporting analytics, ML, and AI use cases.
• Build ingestion frameworks for large-scale structured and unstructured data including streaming sources.
• Enable and support ML/AI workflows, feature engineering, data prep, and deployment support.
• Drive Generative AI initiatives, data quality, observability, lineage, and governance.
• Collaborate with product, analytics, and infrastructure teams to deliver high-impact data and AI solutions.

Skills

Python

SQL

Spark

Databricks

OCR

Generative AI

Cloud platforms

DevOps/CI/CD

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Airflow

GitHub Actions

Docker

Terraform

Kubernetes

Kafka

Job description

Optum within UnitedHealth Group seeks a Principal AI Data Engineer to design end-to-end AI pipelines for large-scale unstructured data, enabling advanced analytics, Generative AI, and investigative insights. You will transform OCR-driven data into AI-ready data products and build LLM-powered systems in production.

This role sits at the intersection of data engineering and AI, focusing on modern data pipelines, production-grade AI capabilities, and collaboration across stakeholders.