Optum · 1 month ago
Lead Research Scientist, Foundation Models and Agentic Systems - Optum AI
Annapolis, MD
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$110K/yr - $189K/yr
7+ years expOptum is a global organization that delivers care aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. They are seeking a Lead Research Scientist to advance AI/ML solutions in healthcare, focusing on the development of foundation models and agentic systems that enhance clinical workflows and health outcomes.
EducationHealth CareMedicalPharmaceutical
Responsibilities
Lead research on pretraining and post‑training of language models
Design and train domain‑specialized LLMs and smaller language models (SLMs) for healthcare applications
Explore novel pretraining objectives, architectures, and data curation strategies
Develop post‑training pipelines (RL, RLHF, RLAIF) to align models with clinical best practices, safety guidelines, and user preferences
Develop RL/RLHF/RLAIF methods at production scale
Design reward models and feedback collection strategies with clinicians and domain experts
Implement and evaluate RL‑based fine‑tuning of foundation models using human and AI feedback
Work with platform teams to run large‑scale, distributed experiments on modern GPU/cloud infrastructure
Build and study agentic systems for healthcare
Design agent architectures that can plan, call tools/APIs, interact with retrieval systems (eg, RAG), and handle multi‑step clinical workflows
Investigate memory, planning, and tool‑use strategies to make agents reliable, controllable, and debuggable
Define and evaluate benchmarks for agent performance, robustness, and safety in healthcare contexts
Drive research to production and publish your work
Own the end‑to‑end lifecycle of research projects: problem formulation, literature review, experimentation, evaluation, and iteration
Collaborate with product teams to translate research into deployed systems that support clinicians, care managers, and patients
Publish findings in top‑tier AI and ML venues (eg, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, MLHC, CHIL) and present internally to Optum AI and business leaders
Ensure safety, fairness, and responsible AI
Closely collaborate with the Responsible Use of AI (RUAI) team to embed safety, fairness, and compliance into model and agent design
Develop evaluation protocols, diagnostics, and documentation to support model governance and regulatory requirements
Contribute to high‑quality engineering and collaboration
Build robust training and evaluation pipelines using Python, PyTorch/TensorFlow, and modern ML tooling
Follow best practices for software development (tests, packaging, GitHub, code review)
Communicate clearly with cross‑functional teams and stakeholders through written documents, technical talks, and presentations
Qualification
Required
PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, Electrical Engineering, or a related quantitative field or equivalent experience
7+ years of hands‑on experience (including PhD research and post-doctoral research) building and evaluating NLP models using deep learning frameworks (preferably PyTorch) and libraries such as Hugging Face Transformers
2+ years of experience with modern NLP / GenAI approaches, such as: LLMs and SLMs (fine‑tuning, evaluation, prompt engineering, safety), Text embeddings, classification, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Distributed or large‑scale training of generative models
Demonstrated experience leading research projects (eg, as a primary author on publications, leading subprojects in your research group, or driving technical direction on an industry or internship project)
Solid research background in machine learning, with emphasis in at least one of: Reinforcement learning / RLHF / RLAIF, Natural language processing / large language models, Agentic systems, planning, or tool‑using agents
Preferred
Experience building RLHF or RLAIF pipelines end‑to‑end (e.g., reward modeling, feedback collection, policy optimization)
Experience with agent frameworks (e.g., tool‑use, planning, workflow orchestration) or multi‑agent systems
Experience working with large‑scale, real‑world data (healthcare, finance, recommendation systems, etc.)
Experience mentoring junior researchers or engineers
Familiarity with safe and responsible AI practices, especially in high‑stakes domains
Proven solid publication record in top‑tier AI/ML/NLP venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, KDD, AAAI), ideally including work related to LLMs, RL, or agentic systems Healthcare‑related publications
Benefits
Comprehensive benefits package
Incentive and recognition programs
Equity stock purchase
401k contribution
Company
Optum
Optum is a healthcare company that provides pharmacy services, health care operations, and population health management. It is a sub-organization of UnitedHealth Group.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Optum has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (648)
2024 (559)
2023 (620)
2022 (851)
2021 (593)
2020 (438)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageLeadership Team
Daniel Castillo
Chief Executive Officer, Optum Care Delivery
J
Jay Green
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
2025-11-29
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2025-11-07
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