Associate AI/ML Engineer

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.  

We are seeking an entry level AI Engineer with a strong interest in Generative AI (GenAI), Agentic AI, and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

In this role, you will work alongside senior engineers and data scientists to build, test, and deploy AI powered applications using Large Language Models (LLMs), vector databases, and agent frameworks.

This position is ideal for early career engineers who are strong in Python and software fundamentals and are eager to build production ready GenAI solutions, not just experiments.

Primary Responsibilities

• Generative AI & LLM Development
  • Assist in designing and developing GenAI based applications using Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Implement prompt engineering, prompt chaining, and basic fine tuning techniques under guidance
  • Evaluate LLM outputs for quality, safety, hallucination risks, and performance
• RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
  • Build and maintain RAG pipelines by integrating LLMs with document stores and vector databases
  • Assist in data ingestion, chunking strategies, embedding generation, and retrieval evaluation
  • Work on use cases such as chat with documents, enterprise search, and knowledge assistants
• Agentic AI
  • Contribute to the development of AI agents capable of tool use, multi step reasoning, and workflow orchestration
  • Implement simple autonomous or semi autonomous agents using agent frameworks under supervision
  • Help define agent goals, constraints, and guardrails
• Software Engineering & Integration
  • Develop backend services and APIs (REST / FastAPI) to expose AI capabilities to applications
  • Write clean, testable Python code following software engineering best practices
  • Participate in code reviews, testing, and debugging of AI systems
• Data & Model Operations
  • Assist with data preparation for structured and unstructured datasets
  • Support experimentation, benchmarking, and comparison of GenAI approaches
  • Follow responsible AI practices, including secure handling of sensitive data (PII/PHI)
• What You Will Learn
  • Building production grade GenAI systems, not just demos
  • Designing agent based workflows for real business use cases
  • Applying RAG patterns to enterprise knowledge and documents
  • Working within an AI first software development lifecycle
  • Best practices for safe, reliable, and scalable AI solutions
• Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

Required Qualification

• Experience working with AI/ML

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.