Remote Senior AI Platform Engineer - ML/LLM Systems

Optum; Eden Prairie (MN); Hybrid; USD 165,000 - 282,000; Full time

Job summary

Optum is seeking a Principal AI/ML Engineer to design, build and operate a scalable AI platform and agent runtime within the enterprise AI team. You will own from design to production, setting standards, APIs and tooling across teams, and enable secure PHI-ready model access and efficient inference.

Ideal candidates have deep experience in ML/AI systems, distributed services, and production-grade software engineering, with strong Python skills and cloud-native delivery expertise.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or a related technical field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
• 5+ years designing distributed services and platform-level APIs used by other teams.
• Experience building or operating ML/AI or data-intensive systems in production.
• Hands-on experience with LLM-based or agentic systems, including retrieval-augmented generation and tool calls.
• Proficient in Python and at least one other production language such as Go, Java, TypeScript, Scala or C++.
• Demonstrated depth in software engineering fundamentals: testing, debugging, code review, and documentation.
• Experience with cloud-native delivery: containers, Kubernetes, CI/CD, IaC, and observability.
• Experience with large-scale computing frameworks and distributed data processing.
• Experience with security, privacy or regulatory constraints.

Responsibilities

• Design, code, test, debug, document and maintain the services that make up the AI platform.
• Design the public surface of the platform — APIs, SDKs, client libraries and schemas for easy integration.
• Build the Capability Gateway with MCP servers, authentication, authorization and conformance tests.
• Build and operate the agent harness and runtime: orchestration, state management, retrieval paths and retries.
• Establish engineering standards, tooling, CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure as code practices.
• Engineer the platform for cost and scale, including inference routing, caching and per-tenant telemetry.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

ML/AI systems

LLMs / agentive systems

Python

Go/Java/TypeScript/C++

Testing & debugging

Cloud & Kubernetes

Security & compliance

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

Kubernetes

Databricks

Spark

CI/CD & IaC

Job description

Optum is seeking a Principal AI/ML Engineer to design, build and operate a scalable AI platform and agent runtime within the enterprise AI team. You will own from design to production, setting standards, APIs and tooling across teams, and enable secure PHI-ready model access and efficient inference.

Ideal candidates have deep experience in ML/AI systems, distributed services, and production-grade software engineering, with strong Python skills and cloud-native delivery expertise.