Remote Digital AI Architect for Conversational UX

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

Job summary

Optum is seeking a visionary Digital AI architect for our Contract Center Transformation. The successful candidate will lead strategic vision, architecture, and implementation of AI contact solutions across consumer-facing digital experiences, including web, mobile, chat, voice, and search.

You’ll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere within the U.S. with an in-office minimum of four days per week in the Minneapolis or Washington, DC area.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent.
• 5+ years of solution architecture or software engineering for customer-facing chat, messaging, conversational AI, or digital customer experience platforms.
• 3+ years designing and implementing conversational chat systems in production, including orchestration, session handling, routing, and human handoff.
• 3+ years building or integrating customer chat experiences into web/mobile apps using APIs/SDKs, secure authentication, and session/context management patterns.
• 3+ years of experience implementing conversational AI for chat, including multi-turn conversation handling, fulfillment, escalation, and fallback design.
• 3+ years with memory/context management, multi-agent or multi-bot orchestration, grounding/guardrails, evaluation frameworks, or telemetry/quality feedback loops for conversational systems.
• Experience with REST, event-driven systems, async messaging, data contracts, and error-handling patterns.
• Ability to produce architecture artifacts, lead technical workshops, mentor engineers, and communicate clearly with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Operational mindset including monitoring/alerting, incident support, root cause analysis, and change safety for customer-facing conversational platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end technical architecture for conversational chat across web, mobile, and digital channels.
• Design channel-agnostic chat architectures separating delivery from conversation intelligence and backend integrations.
• Define multi-bot/multi-agent orchestration patterns including routing between deterministic flows, AI agents, domain bots, and human agents.
• Design robust conversation state, memory, context propagation, and session continuity across channels and devices.
• Define guardrails for chat systems including policy enforcement, tool restrictions, grounding/validation patterns, escalation rules, and safe fallback behavior.
• Establish telemetry, observability, and evaluation patterns for conversational systems (latency, fallbacks, drop-offs, QA feedback).
• Design secure integration patterns between chat systems and enterprise services (identity, CRM, case management, APIs).
• Define bot-to-agent handoff patterns and unified customer journey continuity.
• Lead architecture reviews, publish reusable patterns, mentor engineers, and influence cross-functional stakeholders.
• Evaluate emerging conversational AI capabilities to improve maintainability, quality, and scalability.

Skills

Solution architecture

Software engineering

Conversational AI

REST APIs

Async messaging

Mentor engineers

Stakeholder communication

Monitoring/alerting

Education

Bachelor's degree

Tools

APIs/SDKs

CI/CD

Terraform

Job description

Optum is seeking a visionary Digital AI architect for our Contract Center Transformation. The successful candidate will lead strategic vision, architecture, and implementation of AI contact solutions across consumer-facing digital experiences, including web, mobile, chat, voice, and search.

You’ll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere within the U.S. with an in-office minimum of four days per week in the Minneapolis or Washington, DC area.