Senior Director of Conversational AI - Remote

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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 diversity and inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health equity on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

We need a senior leader (SG31) in the US to drive business value by enhancing member facing experiences and conversational AI, leading initiatives for call obviation and supporting workforce management across the globe. This role is very crucial for Consumer Engineering and it involves strategy development, leading delivery, influencing tech innovation, and supporting availability and resilience of our digital systems

Who You Are

• You love developing and growing people and have a track record doing it!
• You have experience in leading, managing, coaching and mentoring software developers towards delivering timely, high-quality software together with them
• You have experience in encouraging a strong culture in an agile environment
• Have a validated engineering background with previous experience developing large scale systems for data engineering, including processing, storage, quality and management
• You are experienced in working with a diverse set of partners and helping them understand the trade-offs to different product and technical decisions
• You care about agile software processes, development, reliability, and responsible experimentation
  
  

You’ll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges.

Primary Responsibilities

• Build and lead a team of engineers through hiring, coaching, mentoring, feedback and hands-on career development
• Drive and be accountable for technical delivery and work with your team on strategy and execution
• Facilitate collaboration with other engineers and product managers in solving exciting and challenging problems across the platform
• Advocate and advance modern, agile software development practices and help develop and evangelize great engineering and organizational practices
• Grow a healthy, collaborative engineering culture in line with the things we value
• Be an active member of the leadership team and collaborate with other leaders in the organization
• Grow the technical expertise of the team
• Lead, inspire, coach and mentor multiple product engineering teams
• Lead, architect, and design a highly available, internet scale applications
• Build trusting relationships with key business stakeholders to align/influence business and IT architecture
• Translate company business strategy into concrete solutions, own and operate them
• Drive organizational culture change and mindset shifts by articulating a compelling vision and effectively galvanizing change agents
  
  

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

• Undergraduate degree in technology, engineering, or science
• 10+ years of software engineering experience leading development teams, with deep computer science fundamentals including Algorithms, Data Structures, and practical applications of these to build distributed software systems
• 10+ years of Advanced project planning and execution skills including estimating, scheduling, and executing on committed schedules
• 5+ years of experience with cloud-native environments and ecosystems (AWS highly preferred)
• 6+ months of experience in building, integrating, and deploying conversational AI solutions, including voice and chatbots
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Advanced degree in technology, engineering, or science
• Strategy: Proven experience leading AI/ML-driven conversational AI initiatives, with a solid ability to develop and execute strategic roadmaps for voice and text-based AI interactions
• Voice AI Deployment Experience: Experience integrating voice AI solutions into enterprise contact center platforms (Genesys, Amazon Connect, Twilio, etc.) and building feedback loops for better latency, speech recognition and call deflection
• Enterprise AI Implementation: Experience deploying AI solutions in large-scale healthcare or enterprise environments, balancing innovation with regulatory and compliance needs
• Data & Model Optimization: Experience with data-driven decision-making, model training, performance tuning, and bias mitigation in AI systems
• AI/ML & Voice Technology Experience
• Exceptional communication skills and experience presenting to a C-level audience
• Technical Acumen: Solid background in AI/ML frameworks, cloud platforms (AWS/Azure), and API-driven architectures
• Conversational AI Expertise: Deep understanding of NLP, LLMs, and chatbot technologies, including experience with building automated training feedback loops
• Voice AI Expertise: Deep understanding of ASR/STT, TTS technologies, including bleeding edge generative AI solutions in this space such as voice to voice LLMs. Experience designing and optimizing voice bots and multimodal AI interactions
• Proven success in growing and managing geographically distributed teams using successful recruiting, employee development, and retention
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Provena ability to work with engineering, product, and business teams to drive AI adoption and optimize chatbot performance
• Deep understanding of current trends in the industry, esp with leading AI/ML tech companies
• All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group’s Telecommuter Policy
  
  

The salary range for this role is $150,200 to $288,500 annually based on full-time employment. Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. UnitedHealth Group complies with all minimum wage laws as applicable. In addition to your salary, UnitedHealth Group offers benefits such as, a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). No matter where or when you begin a career with UnitedHealth Group, you’ll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives.

Application Deadline: This will be posted for a minimum of 2 business days or until a sufficient candidate pool has been collected. Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.

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.

UnitedHealth Group is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.

UnitedHealth Group is a drug - free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.