Join a global health optimization leader, Optum, and contribute to improving health outcomes by connecting people with essential care and resources. This role offers a chance to work within an inclusive culture alongside talented peers, comprehensive benefits, and significant career development opportunities. Make a tangible impact on communities worldwide while advancing health optimization on a global scale. Embrace a culture of caring, connecting, and growing together.

This position is crucial for developing and supporting cutting-edge AI/ML capabilities within the Behavioral Health portfolio. You will be instrumental in creating scalable, AI-powered business solutions that leverage advanced workflows, APIs, data pipelines, and automated testing.

Optum is dedicated to making healthcare better for everyone, focusing on removing barriers and delivering equitable care. The company is committed to environmental stewardship and addressing health disparities to improve health outcomes across diverse populations.

As a hands-on contributor, you will build and maintain AI/ML capabilities, including workflows, APIs, data pipelines, and production-ready components for scalable AI solutions. You'll focus on coding, model integration, prompt development, automated testing, data processing, deployment, and production support, contributing reusable components across various initiatives like Behavioral Health Modernization and Provider Digital Agentic AI.

Expand your ownership of features as your technical expertise and business domain knowledge grow. You will develop, test, and maintain AI/ML services, large language model workflows, APIs, data pipelines, and application components. Key tasks include implementing prompts, RAG pipelines, embeddings, vector retrieval, structured outputs, tool integrations, and agent workflows. Developing document-processing capabilities from ingestion to summarization, and building model-evaluation scripts, automated tests, and data-quality checks are also core responsibilities.

Support the integration of AI services with provider portals, dashboards, and clinical systems. Write clean, secure, and maintainable Python code. Actively participate in design discussions, code reviews, sprint demonstrations, and defect resolution. Monitor AI services, investigate issues related to prompts, models, data, and performance, and create comprehensive technical documentation for code, APIs, prompts, and deployment processes. Adhere to responsible AI, privacy, security, and compliance requirements, utilizing AI-assisted development tools throughout the lifecycle. Collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams.

A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, AI/ML, Data Science, Engineering, or a related field is required, coupled with over 8 years of hands-on software development experience in Java, SQL, Git, APIs, and automated testing. A minimum of 5 years in software engineering and 2+ years specifically in developing and supporting AI/ML applications and Large Language Models (LLMs) are essential.

Demonstrated experience in building applications with LLMs, prompt engineering, RAG, vector databases, or agent frameworks is crucial. You should possess working knowledge of machine learning, natural language processing, embeddings, transformers, and model evaluation. Familiarity with technologies like PyTorch, TensorFlow, scikit-learn, Hugging Face, LangChain, LangGraph, or Semantic Kernel is expected.

Proficiency with cloud platforms, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, logging, and application monitoring is necessary. Understanding of secure coding practices, data privacy, model traceability, responsible AI, and human-in-the-loop design is vital. Proven analytical, debugging, collaboration, and technical documentation skills are a must. A willingness to learn about Behavioral Health workflows and healthcare compliance, alongside the ability to work effectively within cross-functional and distributed delivery teams, is highly valued.