Sr. AI/ML Engineer- Remote or Eden Prairie, MN

UnitedHealth Group; Eden Prairie (MN); Remote; USD 120,000 - 215,000; Full time

Job summary

UnitedHealth Group is seeking a Sr AI/ML Engineer to join the United AI Studio team. You will design, build, and deploy AI-powered, agentic solutions across an enterprise AI platform, including MCP servers, plugins, and skills that enable registration, discovery, and governance of AI assets.

You will work on responsible AI reviews, tool design, and scalable architectures, contributing to enterprise-wide agent ecosystems and governance rails while collaborating with teams to deliver cutting-edge

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or 5+ years of equivalent software/AI engineering experience.
• 5+ years of backend software engineering, APIs, and service integration.
• 2+ years of hands-on production experience with code-first agent frameworks.
• 2+ years of building and deploying agentic solutions in production.
• 1+ years designing, building, or integrating MCP servers/tools/plugins.
• 1+ years implementing evaluation harnesses for LLM/agent behavior.
• Experience using AI coding assistants (Claude Code, Codex, Copilot).

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions with responsible use of AI.
• Build end-to-end agentic experiences; manage design, state, retries, and costs.
• Design orchestration architectures: single agents, subagents, deterministic pipelines.
• Expose AI capabilities via APIs with authentication and auditability.
• Deliver agentic experiences into enterprise search and chat surfaces.
• Stand up evaluation harnesses for agent behavior and CI/CD integration.
• Instrument production agents with tracing and cost telemetry.
• Test agents against prompt injections and vulnerabilities.
• Leverage enterprise AI tools to raise technical execution standards.

Skills

Backend software engineering

AI engineering

Agent frameworks

Production issues debugging

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Tools

LangGraph

Google ADK

AWS Strands

Claude Agent SDK

OpenAI Agents SDK

Pydantic AI

Job description

Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The work you do with our team will directly improve health outcomes by connecting people with the care, pharmacy benefits, data and resources they need to feel their best. Here, you will find a culture guided by inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health optimization on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

As a Sr AI/ML Engineer on the United AI Studio team, you will build agentic experiences on an enterprise AI platform-including Agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, plugins, and skills that enable teams to register, discover, and govern AI assets. You will build agents that eliminate friction across engineering workflows, starting with responsible AI reviews. You will join a team running AI Solution governance, AI Catalog, and enterprise-wide agent/skill registries, working alongside teams building underlying governance rails to deliver cutting-edge AI capabilities across the organization.

You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges.

Primary Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions to address complex business challenges with an emphasis on responsible use of AI
• Build agentic experiences end-to-end, managing tool design, context and state management, failure handling, retries, and cost/latency budgets from prototype through production behind enterprise gateways
• Design orchestration architectures, choosing between single agents, subagents, and deterministic pipelines, evaluating when a workflow should or should not be agentic
• Expose AI capabilities through channel-agnostic APIs and Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools with required authentication, scoping, and auditability
• Deliver agentic experiences into enterprise search and chat surfaces (e.g., Teams, Slack, Glean) using bot frameworks, connectors, and APIs
• Stand up evaluation harnesses for agent behavior using golden task sets, trajectory/end-state scoring, LLM-as-judge calibrated against human labels, and regression suites integrated into CI/CD pipelines
• Instrument production agents with tracing across tool calls, token/cost telemetry, and failure taxonomies, feeding real traces back into evaluation sets
• Test agents adversarially against prompt injections and tool output vulnerabilities, implementing necessary remediations
• Leverage enterprise-approved AI coding tools to streamline workflows, automate engineering tasks, and raise technical execution standards across teams

You’ll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or 5+ years of equivalent software/AI engineering experience
• 5+ years of experience in backend software engineering, APIs, and service integration
• 2+ years of hands-on production experience with code-first agent frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, Google ADK, AWS Strands, Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Pydantic AI)
• 2+ years of experience building and deploying agentic solutions used in production environments, with a proven ability to debug and resolve production issues
• 1+ years of experience designing, building, or integrating Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, tools, skills, or plugins
• 1+ years of experience implementing systematic evaluation harnesses or testing frameworks for LLM/agent behavior
• Demonstrated experience using AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Copilot) as part of daily development workflows

Preferred Qualifications

• Hands-on experience with managed agent runtimes (Azure AI Foundry Agent Service, Vertex AI Agent Engine, Bedrock AgentCore) and containerized deployments (GKE, EKS, AKS)
• Experience with retrieval and semantic search (embeddings, vector stores, RAG patterns, chunking, reranking with Postgres/pgvector, Azure AI Search, or OpenSearch) and evaluating retrieval efficacy
• Experience with LLM evaluation tooling (Ragas, DeepEval, Ranx, Braintrust, LangSmith, Langfuse, promptfoo) integrated directly into CI/CD pipelines
• Experience routing model calls through enterprise gateways to manage failover, cost attribution, and model version pinning
• Knowledge of durable execution for long-running agents (checkpointing, resumability, idempotent tool calls) and enterprise fundamentals (SSO, RBAC, audit, secrets management)

*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy.

Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer benefits such as, a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). No matter where or when you begin a career with us, you’ll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $120,100 - $214,500 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.

Application Deadline: This will be posted for a minimum of 2 business days or until a sufficient candidate pool has been collected. Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.

At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and make the health system work better for everyone. We believe everyone-of every race, gender, sexuality, age, location and income-deserves the opportunity to live their healthiest life. Today, however, there are still far too many barriers to good health which are disproportionately experienced by people of color, historically marginalized groups and those with lower incomes. We are committed to mitigating our impact on the environment and enabling and delivering equitable care that addresses health disparities and improves health outcomes - an enterprise priority reflected in our mission.

UnitedHealth Group is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.

UnitedHealth Group is a drug-free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.

#optumtechpj