Lead Software Engineer

Optum is seeking an experienced Lead Software Engineer (IC) to architect, build, and scale cutting-edge agentic AI systems that enhance healthcare delivery and operations. In this hands-on leadership role, you will drive the design, development, and deployment of complex AI-powered solutions, collaborating with data engineering, clinical teams, and enterprise stakeholders to deliver scalable, compliant technology at pace.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement multi-agent workflows where large language models plan tasks, decompose work, call tools and APIs, and synthesize answers from diverse clinical and operational data sources.
• Build retrieval augmented generation and hybrid search pipelines to enable robust question answering over clinical and operational datasets.
• Architect, code, test, document, and maintain scalable big data and cloud solutions.
• Develop scalable microservices and APIs to integrate agent capabilities into clinician tools and internal applications.
• Leverage and adapt LLMs with prompt engineering, grounding, guardrails, and domain adaptation for healthcare terminology and tasks.
• Design intelligent frameworks and fine-tune models to meet compliance, accuracy, and ethical standards.
• Establish evaluation frameworks (automatic plus human-in-the-loop) to measure faithfulness, helpfulness, bias, toxicity, privacy leakage, and overall quality.
• Collaborate with data engineering to build feature/retrieval stores, embeddings pipelines, and ETL/ELT jobs on Spark/Databricks; design analytics models and rules engines.
• Define and develop APIs for enterprise-wide integrations; optimize data access patterns for low-latency inference.
• Own MLOps/LLMOps responsibilities: CI/CD for models/prompts, automated tests, versioning, lineage, rollback; support blue/green or canary releases.
• Instrument SLOs/SLIs and cost KPIs with dashboards and alerts (latency, availability, hallucination/defect rate, token and GPU-hour usage).
• Lead production deployments on internal platforms (such as UAIS) ensuring observability, reliability, and cost controls.
• Champion HIPAA and regulated industry controls; implement access controls, PHI/PPI safeguards, data minimization, encryption, and auditability.
• Work with legal, compliance, and clinical safety teams to operationalize Responsible AI principles.
• Analyze customer requirements and help shape product technical architecture and delivery roadmaps.
• Provide effort estimates for resource planning and collaborate with QA, architecture, and peer teams.
• Prepare technical documentation, support production environments, mentor engineers, and maintain ongoing skills development.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, IT, or related field.
• 10+ years of total technology experience.
• 8+ years hands-on software development, data engineering, or analytics with proven AI/ML delivery (Azure preferred) using Scala, Python, and PySpark.
• 4+ years hands-on with Databricks.
• 4+ years experience with ADF/Airflow for orchestration and scaling.
• 4+ years with big data and streaming technologies (Hadoop, MapReduce/HDFS, Spark, Kafka); familiarity with Docker/Kubernetes.
• 4+ years with MySQL and NoSQL databases.
• 4+ years in Agile/Scrum environments, using GitHub, Jenkins CI/CD, and JUnit; strong coding standards and code reviews.
• 2+ years working with LLMs and GenAI (Langchain, LangGraph, RAG, Vector DB, Azure OpenAI, MCP Server, Agents, LangFuse).
• 2+ years of container experience (Docker/Kubernetes).
• 1+ year experience building services or full-stack applications (e.g., FastAPI/Flask, Node.js, React/Angular, TypeScript, HTML/CSS).

Technologies

• Scala
• Python
• PySpark
• Databricks
• ADF/Airflow
• Hadoop
• MapReduce/HDFS
• Spark
• Kafka
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• MySQL
• NoSQL databases
• GitHub
• Jenkins
• JUnit
• Langchain, LangGraph, RAG, Vector DB
• Azure Open AI, MCP Server, Agents, LangFuse
• FastAPI, Flask
• Node.js, React, Angular, TypeScript
• HTML/CSS
• UAIS
• Azure

Benefits

• Comprehensive benefits package
• Incentive and recognition programs
• Equity stock purchase
• 401k contribution

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in healthcare or familiarity with clinical datasets
• Background in regulated industries with knowledge of ethical AI and compliance practices
• Understanding of SOA and enterprise integration concepts
• Publications, patents, or notable open-source contributions
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills

Application Deadline

This position will be posted for a minimum of two business days or until a sufficient candidate pool is reached. The posting may be withdrawn earlier if applicant volume is high.