Senior AI/ML Engineer (Remote) – LLM, RAG & Responsible AI

Optum; Eden Prairie (MN); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 215,000; Full time

Job summary

Optum, a part of UnitedHealth Group, is seeking a Senior AI/ML Engineer to own the intelligence layer of consumer-facing solutions. Design, build, evaluate, and improve AI components including LLMs, RAG, and copilots while ensuring safety and enterprise readiness.

You will collaborate with Data Engineering, QA, Security, Privacy, and Compliance teams to deliver scalable AI that is explainable, governable, and measurable in production settings.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of engineering experience with strong technical proficiency in Python or equivalent programming language.
• Practical experience building and deploying AI-enabled applications in enterprise settings, including hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt engineering, and agent frameworks.
• Demonstrated experience working with model APIs, orchestration frameworks, data pipelines, and evaluation tooling.
• Solid understanding of model limitations, hallucination risks, bias/fairness concerns, and responsible AI frameworks.
• Proven ability to design AI workflows that are explainable, testable, governable, and safe.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions, LLM workflows, prompt chains, agents, RAG patterns, model integrations, classification models, and decision-support tools to address complex business challenges.
• Develop prompt strategies, tool-calling patterns, grounding techniques, guardrails, and fallback behaviors with an emphasis on responsible AI practices.
• Partner with Data Engineering to ensure AI components have access to trusted, appropriate, and governed data sources.
• Build and maintain evaluation datasets, scoring rubrics, model-performance tests, and failure-mode analysis tools.
• Monitor and continuously improve output quality, hallucination risk, relevance, accuracy, consistency, latency, and operational cost in production environments.
• Partner with Quality Assurance, Responsible AI, Security, Privacy, Compliance, and Architecture teams to ensure AI solutions are safe and enterprise-ready.
• Document model behavior, known limitations, risk controls, and operational monitoring needs, while supporting production readiness, model observability, and drift monitoring.
• Evaluate emerging trends and leverage enterprise-approved AI tools to streamline workflows, automate tasks, and drive continuous strategic innovation.

Skills

Python

LLMs

RAG

Embeddings

Vector search

Prompt engineering

Agent frameworks

Model APIs

Data pipelines

Evaluation tooling

Responsible AI

Education

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or related technical discipline

Job description

Optum, a part of UnitedHealth Group, is seeking a Senior AI/ML Engineer to own the intelligence layer of consumer-facing solutions. Design, build, evaluate, and improve AI components including LLMs, RAG, and copilots while ensuring safety and enterprise readiness.

You will collaborate with Data Engineering, QA, Security, Privacy, and Compliance teams to deliver scalable AI that is explainable, governable, and measurable in production settings.