Optum Data Science Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
You will join a collaborative AI Platform team building a payer-focused agentic platform that orchestrates data, models, and workflows to support complex healthcare operations. In this role, you will provide critical onshore leadership for AI platform execution and forward deployment across Payment Integrity and Optum Real, ensuring secure, scalable delivery of reusable AI services. The team designs and delivers intelligent, agent-driven applications that review and reason over clinical and administrative data, evaluate AI outputs, and automate decision workflows, while ensuring our production systems are reliable, scalable, and continuously improving.
By applying AI to agentic workflows, deployment automation, and production observability in customer environments, you will help accelerate delivery, reduce risk, enable platform reuse, and drive repeatable revenue. We have the data and resources to make an impact on a massive scale; when our solutions are deployed, they process millions of clinical data elements and benefit millions of patients. We are a globally distributed and diverse organization with a shared passion to improve patient outcomes, enhance healthcare operations, and streamline payments. We pay close attention to detail to ensure we deliver high quality, the first time.
You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges. For all hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area, you will be required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week.
Primary Responsibilities:

• Provide strategic and technical leadership for AI platform execution and forward deployment across Payment Integrity and Optum Real, ensuring secure, reliable, and scalable delivery of reusable AI services
• Lead and inspire a high-performing team of AI/ML engineers and senior staff, fostering a culture of trust, ownership, product quality, and consistent execution excellence while setting clear AI development goals within team plans
• Champion AI as a core driver of team success, strategically designing, developing, and deploying AI-powered solutions to address complex clinical and administrative healthcare challenges and deliver measurable business value
• Strategically design and deliver intelligent, agentic workflows and agent-driven applications that review and reason over clinical and administrative data in customer environments
• Drive engineering and operational excellence across the full development lifecycle by applying AI to deployment automation, robust automated testing, continuous integration, and production observability in customer environments
• Leverage and integrate enterprise-approved AI tools to streamline engineering workflows, automate routine developer tasks, and drive continuous operational improvement
• Champion the ethical use of AI across all projects, proactively embedding transparency, fairness, and accountability throughout the entire AI lifecycle of reusable services
• Partner cross-functionally with product managers, customer integration teams, senior stakeholders, and enterprise leaders to represent the engineering vision, accelerate platform reuse, and drive repeatable revenue

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 in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Mathematics, Statistics, or a related quantitative field, or 4+ additional years of equivalent software engineering experience in lieu of a degree
• 12+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Data Science, or Analytics, with 3+ years dedicated to AI/ML engineering or related fields
• 3+ years of experience directly managing, coaching, and developing engineering teams of 5+ people, including senior engineers
• Demonstrated experience leading and managing AI/ML projects from initial ideation and development through to customer-facing production delivery, deployment, and evaluation
• Technical experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and containerization/orchestration tools (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Experience with DevSecOps, automated CI/CD practices (e.g., Git, Jenkins), and proficiency in Python or other programming languages for data analysis and AI/ML development

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related quantitative field
• 2+ years of hands-on experience with Generative AI technologies, including large language models (LLMs like OpenAI, Claude, Gemini), LangChain, AI Agents, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), Vector Databases, Prompt Engineering, and model fine-tuning
• Experience applying AI to agentic workflows, deployment automation, and production observability (e.g., model monitoring, logging, and performance tracking)
• Experience in establishing and enforcing AI/ML engineering best practices, design standards, and ethical guidelines
• Experience in Payment Integrity, clinical operations, or healthcare claim systems
• Experience managing or working with a mixed team, both onshore and offshore

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records
*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 $148,900 to $255,300 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.
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