Lead AI/ML Software Engineer - Remote

Role Overview

Lead AI/ML Software Engineer (Remote) at Optum (Optum AI). You will lead the inference, delivery, and operationalization of machine learning insights for multiple healthcare customers, helping bring AI innovations into real-world products.

Primary Responsibilities

• Own inference and delivery of ML insights to multiple customers
• Manage, monitor, and scale ML systems to deliver insights at scale
• Partner with cross-functional engineering teams to implement scalable, flexible AI/ML pipelines
• Work with large-scale data and distributed computing frameworks to process and analyze high-volume healthcare datasets
• Improve pipeline efficiency and reliability via profiling, refactoring, and engineering best practices
• Develop new data pipelines to enhance ML model usage

Required Qualifications

• B.S. in Computer Science or a related quantitative field
• 7+ years of professional software engineering; at least 5+ years building and operating production ML systems
• Expert-level Python for production-grade, testable, maintainable code
• Hands-on experience building and deploying APIs using FastAPI (or similar Python web frameworks)
• Experience deploying, managing, and scaling services in Kubernetes, including:
  • Docker containerization
  • Helm (or equivalent deployment tooling)
  • Resource tuning, autoscaling, and failure recovery
• Proven MLOps experience, including:
  • Model deployment and versioning
  • Monitoring performance, drift, and system health

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with AzureML, Databricks, and Azure Kubernetes
• Experience with distributed computing approaches
• Strong ML Ops (e.g., model monitoring, drift detection, event-based retraining)
• Solid technical communication skills and strong independent learning

Remote Policy / Location

• Remote within the U.S. (anywhere within the United States).