Principal AI Scientist — Generative Health ML, Remote

Optum; Eden Prairie (MN); Remote; USD 113,000 - 193,000; Full time

Job summary

Optum is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to lead advanced AI initiatives from design to production. The role focuses on generative AI, large-scale models, and healthcare data insights, with flexibility for remote work across the U.S.

Applicants in Minneapolis or DC may require in-office days. Responsibilities include end-to-end project leadership, architecture design, model deployment, and mentoring of AI/ML professionals, all within an ethical AI framework and strong collaboration with

Qualifications

• 10+ years of industry or academic experience in machine learning or a related data science field.
• 5+ years of experience building machine learning models for business applications.
• 5+ years of experience leading technical teams or complex AI/ML projects.
• 4+ years of equivalent technical experience in software development/data science.
• 3+ years of experience with Python programming and deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch or TensorFlow).
• 3+ years of experience with state-of-the-art ML architectures (e.g., Transformers/LLMs, multimodal modeling) and transformer fine-tuning.

Responsibilities

• Drive end-to-end generative AI and machine learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, and complexity.
• Design robust AI architectures, ensuring that systems are scalable, secure, and efficient; select appropriate technologies, frameworks, and methodologies.
• Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept experiments, optimize and deploy models to production, and partner with software engineers to productionize ML models.
• Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of healthcare data sets to develop insights that increase business value.
• Run A/B experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis; continuously assess AI system performance and optimize algorithms and models to improve accuracy and efficiency.
• Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine learning model development and validation, and MLOps.
• Research and implement innovative machine learning approaches, evaluate emerging trends to inform solution design, and translate cutting-edge AI advancements into production-ready capabilities that can be re-used across the enterprise.
• Uphold ethical AI principles by embedding fairness, transparency, and accountability throughout the model development lifecycle.
• Mentor and help recruit AI/ML scientists and machine learning engineers to the team.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Transformers

Tools

Hadoop

Spark

Job description

Optum is seeking a Principal Data Scientist to lead advanced AI initiatives from design to production. The role focuses on generative AI, large-scale models, and healthcare data insights, with flexibility for remote work across the U.S.

Applicants in Minneapolis or DC may require in-office days. Responsibilities include end-to-end project leadership, architecture design, model deployment, and mentoring of AI/ML professionals, all within an ethical AI framework and strong collaboration with