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

Taleo; 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, with the option to work remotely or from Eden Prairie, MN. You will build agentic experiences on an enterprise AI platform including Agents, MCP servers, plugins, and skills for registering, discovering, and governing AI assets.

You’ll design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions with a focus on responsible AI, build end-to-end agentic workflows, and integrate capabilities with enterprise gateways, search

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree or 5+ years of software/AI engineering experience
• 5+ years backend software engineering, APIs, and service integration
• 2+ years production experience with code-first agent frameworks
• 2+ years building agentic solutions in production
• 1+ years designing or integrating MCP servers/tools/plugins
• 1+ years testing frameworks for LLM/agent behavior
• Experience using AI coding assistants daily

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy AI-powered solutions with responsible AI focus
• Build end-to-end agentic experiences and manage tool design and state
• Design orchestration architectures and decide when to use agents
• Expose AI capabilities via APIs and MCP tools 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, cost telemetry, and logs
• Test agents against prompt injections and vulnerabilities
• Use enterprise AI coding tools to improve workflows and execution standards

Skills

Backend software engineering

APIs

Service integration

Agent frameworks

Production experience

LLM/agent evaluation

AI coding assistants

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience

Tools

LangGraph

Google ADK

AWS Strands

Claude Agent SDK

OpenAI Agents SDK

Pydantic AI

Azure AI Foundry Agent Service

Vertex AI Agent Engine

Bedrock AgentCore

GKE/EKS/AKS

Postgres/pgvector

Azure AI Search

OpenSearch

LangSmith

Langfuse

promptfoo

Job description

Job Description - Sr. AI/ML Engineer- Remote or Eden Prairie, MN (2383561)

Improve the lives of others while Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

Sr. AI/ML Engineer- Remote or Eden Prairie, MN - 2383561

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, 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.

UnitedHealth Group is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with physical and mental disabilities. If you need special assistance or accommodation for any part of the application process, please call 1-866-566-8715 to be connected to Recruitment Services. Recruitment Services hours of operation are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. CT, Monday through Friday.

UnitedHealth Group is a registered service mark of UnitedHealth Group, Inc. The UnitedHealth Group name with the dimensional logo, as well as the dimensional logo alone, are both service marks for the UnitedHealth Group, Inc.

Diversity creates a healthier atmosphere: UnitedHealth Group is an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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