Senior AI/ML Engineering Leader - Remote

Optum; San Diego (CA); Remote; USD 149,000 - 255,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits package

Equity stock purchase

401k contribution

Job summary

UnitedHealth Group is seeking a Senior Manager of AI/ML Engineering to lead a remote team delivering autonomous medical coding solutions across the U.S. You will shape the technical roadmap, drive ML/LLM production systems, and partner with clinical and compliance teams to ensure secure, compliant, scalable AI in healthcare.

This high-impact role requires hands-on leadership, strong Python and ML framework expertise, and experience deploying LLMs and MLOps at scale, with attention to privacy and

Qualifications

• 6+ years of technical experience in AI/ML engineering, machine learning development, or applied AI solution delivery.
• 2+ years of direct people management or technical leadership experience leading AI/ML engineering teams
• Production-grade ML pipelines, LLM-powered applications, and MLOps platforms handling large-scale data processing
• Experience establishing evaluation frameworks, model monitoring, CI/CD, and responsible AI standards for production models
• Experience deploying Large Language Models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and prompt engineering in enterprise environments
• Proficiency in Python and deep learning/NLP frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, Hugging Face)

Responsibilities

• Lead, mentor, and grow a high-performing team of AI/ML engineers focused on medical coding automation
• Define and execute the engineering strategy for machine learning and LLM-powered products at production scale
• Partner with data science and clinical teams to develop solutions for chart understanding, clinical concept extraction, code assignment, documentation analysis, and coding validation
• Drive the architecture of scalable inference and data-processing systems capable of handling millions of medical charts daily
• Ensure that AI systems meet stringent requirements for accuracy, reliability, latency, cost efficiency, privacy, security, and explainability
• Collaborate with software engineering leaders to integrate ML capabilities into robust SaaS products and customer workflows
• Partner with product and business stakeholders to prioritize initiatives, define success metrics, and translate customer needs into technical solutions
• Work with legal, compliance, security, and clinical stakeholders to support HIPAA-compliant, responsible, and auditable use of AI in healthcare
• Develop evaluation frameworks and quality metrics for coding accuracy, clinical validity, hallucination prevention, confidence estimation, and human review prioritization

Skills

AI/ML engineering

People management

ML pipelines

LLMs

Python

NLP frameworks

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's/PhD

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

UnitedHealth Group is seeking a Senior Manager of AI/ML Engineering to lead a remote team delivering autonomous medical coding solutions across the U.S. You will shape the technical roadmap, drive ML/LLM production systems, and partner with clinical and compliance teams to ensure secure, compliant, scalable AI in healthcare.

This high-impact role requires hands-on leadership, strong Python and ML framework expertise, and experience deploying LLMs and MLOps at scale, with attention to privacy and