Lead Software Engineer - Remote

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.

The Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer is a key technical contributor in the design and development of state-of-the-art NLP and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for medical applications. The Sr NLP Engineer works closely with other NLP engineers, NLP developers, software engineers, and subject matter experts on current company technologies and forward-looking projects.

Primary responsibilities include the enhancement of existing company NLP technologies and extension of those systems to new applications. Emphasis is placed on the augmentation of various clinical knowledge resources (lexicons, nomenclatures, hierarchies, ontologies, and rule systems) underlying the core NLP and AI modules. Emphasis is also placed on evaluation of the performance of those components on clinical documentation at scale in production environments. Work includes the generation and interpretation of domain/solution analytics, and, in collaboration with engineering, enhancement of the underlying NLP modules and functionality. Primary responsibilities also include direct support of team members in the maintenance of company NLP systems for production environments and resolution of internal and external customer issues. Work will involve all aspects of software design and development from system requirements definition to implementation, integration and testing.

The successful candidate will have a solid background in NLP and AI, with an emphasis on text, information retrieval, information extraction, and/or associated principles of knowledge representation and ontological design. The successful candidate will be comfortable contributing to research and design in addition to supporting team members in the ongoing maintenance of existing systems. Solid technical skills are required, as the successful candidate must be able to deliver solutions for use in a production environment.

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.

You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in. 

Required Qualifications:

• Degree in Linguistics, Computer Science, or other Computational discipline
• 7+ years of related professional work experience - significant academic NLP development experience will be considered for solid applicants with advanced degree
• Knowledge of algorithms and techniques within a computational domain with emphasis on text processing
• Knowledge and experience with natural language processing or formal linguistics: morphology, syntax and semantics
• 7+ years of experience with at least one of the following: Python , Java, C#, SQL
• Experience integrating Copilot with GitHub or similar AI-assisted development tools to improve productivity and code quality
• Experience with modern software development and DevOps ecosystems, such as:
  • GitHub (version control, pull requests, code reviews)
  • CI/CD pipelines and automated build/deployment workflows
• Experience working with integrated development environments and tooling such as:
  • Eclipse, Visual Studio
  • Artifact repositories such as Artifactory/JFrog
• Experience building, deploying, and maintaining containerized images in scalable production environments
• Experience with ontologies
• Experience within the medical coding or medical terminology
• Experience with CDI or HEDIS related products

Preferred Qualification:

• Experience with modern AI development tools and applied AI engineering workflows

*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy