Principal AI Architect - 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.** Optum is seeking a visionary Digital AI architect for our Contract Center Transformation. The successful candidate will play a critical role in transforming our voice and digital experiences to conversational experiences, through multiple engagement channels (including web, app, chat, voice, and search), with a particular emphasis on transforming how consumers engage in the US health care system. In this role you will help make UnitedHealth Group's consumer obsessed digital vision come to life by using AI to deliver our next generation Conversational Experiences.Define and lead the strategic vision, architecture, and implementation of AI contact solutions across our consumer\-facing digital experiences. Partner closely with business and product teams to identify and prioritize strategic opportunities for leveraging AI within web, mobile, chat messaging, voice messaging, and search channels. Oversee the development of scalable, secure, and innovative AI solutions designed to enhance consumer engagement and deliver personalized, intuitive self\-service experiences that transform our current digital experiences into conversational experiences. 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. **Primary Responsibilities:** * Own the end\-to\-end technical architecture for conversational chat and messaging systems across web, mobile, and other digital channels * Design and implement channel\-agnostic chat architectures that separate channel delivery from conversation intelligence, orchestration, and backend integrations * Define and implement multi\-bot / multi\-agent orchestration patterns, including routing between deterministic flows, AI agents, domain bots, and human agents * Design robust approaches for conversation state, memory, context propagation, and session continuity across channels, devices, and long\-running customer journeys * Define and implement guardrails for chat systems, including policy enforcement, tool restrictions, grounding/validation patterns, escalation rules, and safe fallback behavior * Establish telemetry, observability, and evaluation patterns for conversational systems, including latency, fallback rates, drop\-off points, repeated questions, low\-confidence signals, transcript analysis, and quality feedback loops * Design secur