Principal AI/ML Engineer - Remote Nationwide or Hybrid in MN/DC

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.

We are looking for a Principal AI/ML Engineer to lead the architecture, design, and end-to-end development of production-grade AI/ML systems. This is a hands-on technical leadership role - you'll set engineering standards, drive adoption of modern ML and agentic AI approaches, and translate research into scalable, enterprise-ready solutions used across the business.

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

• Lead architecture, design, and end-to-end delivery of production AI/ML systems - training, deployment, and monitoring pipelines
• Drive adoption of deep learning and agentic AI approaches across use cases such as NLP/NLU, intent classification, semantic understanding, and ASR
• Translate research and experimental findings into scalable, enterprise-ready solutions
• Define and enforce engineering best practices across the ML lifecycle - versioning, CI/CD, drift detection, performance optimization, model governance
• Design and evaluate agentic workflows (multi-step reasoning, tool-use, orchestration) and establish standards for evaluating and monitoring them safely in production
• Partner with data scientists and applied researchers to bridge the gap between prototypes, platform and production
• Work with