GenAI hiring in India’s healthcare-tech space keeps picking up pace, and the latest one comes from Optum, UnitedHealth Group’s technology and services arm. They’ve opened a position for an AI/ML Engineer based in Hyderabad, and the JD makes it clear this is a hands-on, build-and-ship role — not a research-only or trainee position.
Important note up front: this is an experienced-hire role, not a fresher opening. The qualifications expect real production ML/GenAI experience. If you’re early in your career, treat this as a roadmap for what to build toward rather than something to apply for right now.
The Role at a Glance
- Title: AI/ML Engineer
- Company: Optum (part of UnitedHealth Group)
- Location: Hyderabad, Telangana, India
- Department: Technology
- Requisition ID: 2363248
- Work mode: On-site (not flagged as remote)
- Date posted: June 26, 2026
Where You’d Spend Your Time
This isn’t a “dabble in AI” job — it’s squarely focused on getting generative AI and applied ML systems into production for real healthcare use cases. Day to day, the role involves:
- Building GenAI and NLP solutions on transformer architectures for things like search, summarization, document extraction, and conversational AI
- Working hands-on with LLMs — both commercial (OpenAI, Claude, Gemini) and open-source (LLaMA, Mistral) — and fine-tuning them for specific use cases
- Designing RAG pipelines end-to-end: ingesting documents, chunking strategy, embeddings, and hooking it all into a vector database
- Building agentic AI systems, including multi-agent workflows that can reason, plan, and use tools autonomously
- Setting up evaluation and monitoring for GenAI systems — catching hallucinations, watching for bias, and building human-in-the-loop checks
- Putting in place safety and governance guardrails, including prompt hardening and responsible-AI controls
- Taking AI/ML pipelines into production properly — CI/CD, observability, monitoring, the whole cloud-native operational picture
- Working closely with product, platform, and data science teams to turn requirements into systems that actually scale
There’s also an explicit “Builder” responsibility — designing and shipping AI-powered solutions using no-code/low-code tools as well as more advanced platforms, depending on what the use case calls for.
What Optum Is Looking For
The required qualifications are detailed, and worth reading closely if you’re mapping out a career path toward this kind of role:
On the engineering side, they want hands-on experience across statistical models, traditional ML, deep learning, and GenAI — not just one of these. Familiarity with RAG, LangChain, and vector databases is expected, along with the ability to optimize GenAI models for latency, cost, and performance tradeoffs. They also want proof you can run real proof-of-concepts in a healthcare context, including model training and evaluation against production baselines.
On scale and delivery, the JD asks for experience with large-scale model training and inference, comfort with Databricks/PySpark or similar distributed compute, solid GitHub and code-review habits, and familiarity with Azure and/or AWS.
On the people side, this role expects someone who communicates clearly, can mentor junior engineers, and — notably — can “disagree and commit” to a team direction rather than relitigating decisions.
On responsible AI, there’s a clear expectation of building and testing AI systems in line with enterprise governance standards (the JD references alignment with Optum’s internal Machine Learning Review Board).
A bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience is the baseline educational requirement — the bar here is experience and demonstrated capability, not a specific credential.
Nice-to-Haves
If you’ve got these, they’ll work in your favor, though they’re listed as preferred rather than mandatory:
- A track record of improving GenAI systems on quality, hallucination rate, cost, and latency through structured experimentation
- Experience productionizing AI/ML with full CI/CD and monitoring in a regulated industry
- Specifically, experience delivering AI/ML solutions within healthcare
Who Realistically Fits This
To be direct: this role is built for someone who has already shipped ML or GenAI systems into production, not someone learning the ropes. If that’s you, it’s a strong opportunity — Optum operates at serious scale, and healthcare AI work tends to come with real constraints (governance, accuracy, regulatory exposure) that make for a meaningfully different experience than building a chatbot demo.
If you’re not there yet, the qualifications list above is honestly a decent checklist for what to build toward — RAG pipelines, agentic workflows, deployment practices, and some exposure to distributed compute would all move the needle.
How to Apply
Applications go through UnitedHealth Group’s official Taleo-based careers portal:
👉 Apply for AI/ML Engineer – Hyderabad (Req. 2363248)
This post is based on the job listing publicly available on UnitedHealth Group’s official careers portal at the time of writing. Roles, requirements, and availability can change — verify current details on the official listing before applying.