Lead AI Engineer – US – Telecommuter

Do you want to impact healthcare using Artificial Intelligence at the largest healthcare company in the world? 

 
If so, this is a chance to do just that. You will serve as a Lead AI Engineer within the Advanced Technology Collaborative and create innovative solutions that help us achieve our north star goal of “Fully Autonomous Healthcare”.  We have investment areas within the Home Care, Predictive Healthcare and/or Conversational Voice domains.
 
Within Optum, we possess the best healthcare data sets in the world.  We have the largest scale in the industry covering Insurance, Care Delivery, Fraud Detection and Analytics.  We need you to help us turn that “data advantage” into operational insights that lead to healthier outcomes and a more efficient healthcare system.
 
As you will see in our Guiding Principles and Values, we are a talent first team.  Which means we will adapt the role to fit the top candidate.  Examples:  Managing of people, Working deeper with our product organization, Leading projects, etc. are all on the table.
 
Vision:  The Advanced Technology Collaborative seeks to shape the future of healthcare through new, emerging, and leading technologies that help people live healthier lives.
 
Mission: To serve UnitedHealth Group technology and businesses through investments in emerging technologies that have the potential to disrupt and modernize our existing and new ways of doing business. 
 

• We rapidly iterate, learn, and take risks to drive value back into our businesses. Part of iterating quickly is “embracing failure” and de-risking new technology which allows us to more quickly find value
• We effectively manage a portfolio of projects with varying durations that allows the enterprise to drive towards successful moon shoots while also creating value quickly
• We seek to maximize reusability, speed to value, and cost savings to maximize the value of our investment capital
• We create value by enabling collaboration to bridge across business lines and technology teams

Guiding Principles & Values: 

• Our talent is our greatest asset. We provide a culture of learning that actively fosters talent development at all levels and enable everyone to develop and realize their potential
• We encourage small and fast-paced intrapreneurial teams with a purpose to create value, hone mastery of skills, and act autonomously to respond to our customers’ needs
• We strive to build evidence-based products and services or develop a foundation upon which evidence-based products and services can be built. We clearly articulate our hypotheses, build solutions with provable insights, and systematically learn when a hypothesis is disproved
• We adapt our agile principles in our development efforts to enable every individual and their interactions, build working solutions, consult and advise our customers and domain experts, and respond quickly to change
• Our innovation agenda is driven by the intersection of enabling, developing, and deploying emerging technologies, the needs of our businesses, and our healthcare vision to create disruptive opportunities. Innovative research allows us to push the boundaries of healthcare
• We take on investments opportunities with clearly defined, attainable and time-bound goals with measurable outcomes
• We work in cross-functional teams to address the most strategic opportunities for our business partners by delivering value
• Speed to value is key for our projects; we embrace reuse of cloud, open source, and inner-source wherever possible
• We are inclusive of a team diverse members and seek access to the right expertise within and across teams and approach our projects with a can-do attitude, diversity of thought, and cross pollination.
• Our solutions exhibit a strong link to our corporate mission to help people live healthier lives and to help the health care system work better for everyone
• We are transparent in our work; We seek to create an environment of trust and openness within our team and out to the rest of Optum Technology

Specific responsibilities will include: 

• Collaborate to define and shape the Art of the Possible
• Develop (from scratch) Deep Learning models that solve challenging problems in the healthcare domain
• Build out distributed training of large models for large datasets
• Mentor and develop junior engineers in the AI/ML spaces 
• Develop a prioritized set of technical issues/shortcomings and/or data access challenges that would benefit from the application of general AI and NLP solutions 
• Deliver strategic technical recommendations to address current, near-term and future technical needs
• Make recommendations relative to when to modernize, rewrite, and/or leverage 3rd party technical assets

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.

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

Required Qualifications: 

• Demonstrated Research AI/Deep Learning techniques
• Experience with Tensorflow, Pytorch and/or equivalent AI libraries
• Experience with cloud based (GCP, Azure, AWS) infrastructure and services
• Experience with different Deep Learning model architectures (ie,Transformers, CNN’s, and RNN’s)
• Strong drive to build new architectures and find new insights and “AUTOMATE ALL THE THINGS”
• Demonstrated ability to read, synthesize and adapt academic research to actual production stems
• Track record of shipping software products 
• If you need to enter a work site for any reason, you will be required to screen for symptoms using the ProtectWell mobile app, Interactive Voice Response (i.e., entering your symptoms via phone system) or similar UnitedHealth Group-approved symptom screener. When in a UnitedHealth Group building, employees are required to wear a mask in common areas. In addition, employees must comply with any state and local masking orders

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Advanced degree in relevant area 
• AI publications and/or conference presentations
• Experiences in software development and/or infrastructure in an area other than AI/ML 
• Understanding of Software 2.0 methodology and its application to business problems

Technology Careers with Optum. Information and technology have amazing power to transform the health care industry and improve people’s lives. This is where it’s happening. This is where you’ll help solve the problems that have never been solved. We’re freeing information so it can be used safely and securely wherever it’s needed. We’re creating the very best ideas that can most easily be put into action to help our clients improve the quality of care and lower costs for millions. This is where the best and the brightest work together to make positive change a reality. This is the place to do your life’s best work.^SM

Colorado Residents Only: The salary range for Colorado residents is $169,500 to $322,500. Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, etc. As of the date of this posting, in addition to your salary,  UHG offers the following benefits for this position, subject to applicable eligibility requirements: Health, dental, and vision plans; wellness program; flexible spending accounts; paid parking or public transportation costs; 401(k) retirement plan; employee stock purchase plan; life insurance, short-term disability insurance, and long-term disability insurance; business travel accident insurance; Employee Assistance Program; PTO; and employee-paid critical illness and accident insurance.

*All Telecommuters will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group’s Telecommuter Policy.

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.