Senior Data Scientist

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.
Optum's Applied AI team is seeking a detail-oriented and proactive Senior Data Scientist (Core in Data Analysis) with minimum 3-4 years of industry experience to support the development and maintenance of data pipelines that fuel AI/ML initiatives. You will work closely with data engineers and other data scientists to enable large scale data analysis of prior ML inferred data - structured and unstructured clinical datasets. This role blends hands-on data wrangling, transformation logic, and insight generation in a highly collaborative environment.

Primary Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams - including ML engineers, annotators, and clinical domain experts - to translate business challenges into deployable AI solutions
• Implement automated data labeling pipelines using techniques like active learning, weak supervision, and human-in-the-loop systems
• Support the design, development, and maintenance of scalable data pipelines for AI/ML workflows
• Perform exploratory data analysis (EDA), profiling, and validation on healthcare data to ensure readiness for downstream ML tasks
• Partner with data scientists to prepare datasets for model training, evaluation, and monitoring
• Ensure data quality, consistency, and documentation across structured (e.g., EHRs) and unstructured (e.g., scanned PDFs) sources
• Integrate and monitor data workflows using orchestration tools (e.g., Airflow, Step Functions)
• Build dashboards or reports to communicate insights, trends, or pipeline health as needed
• 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 regard 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 Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or adjacent field
• Advanced degree in a field that emphasizes the use of data science/statistics techniques (e.g.,

Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, or a field with direct NLP application)

• 4+ years of experience in Data Science (Core in Data Analysis) to support the development and maintenance of data pipelines that fuel AI/ML initiatives
• Solid experience in Ms Excel and Version Control using GIT
• Proficiency in Python (Advanced), SQL(Advanced). Experience in tools like Airflow, Jupyter notebook
• Cloud Exposure: Basic familiarity with AWS ecosystem
• Visualization Tools: Power BI, Tableau, or Plotly for dashboarding and reporting
• Data Quality Monitoring: Experience with tools or techniques for detecting data drift or label inconsistencies
• Healthcare/NLP Domain Knowledge: Prior work with clinical documents, EMR data, or coding workflows
• Proven excellent Communication Skills
• Proven flexibility to provide support during critical business periods
• Proven ability to interpret and present complex data in various formats
• Proven positive team player with a drive to learn and contribute to achieving results
• Willingness to work in varying shifts

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.