Senior Data Scientist

Requisition Number: 2357314
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 inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health optimization on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
Leads medium to large PI modeling workstreams from EDA through deployment handoff. Partners closely with business to convert hypotheses into measurable outcomes and mentors junior Data Scientists.
Senior Data Scientist (Full Time)
Domain: Healthcare | Claims PI - M&R, C&S, E&I
Tech Focus: Databricks Lakehouse (PySpark, MLflow, Delta)
Primary Responsibilities:

• Analysis & Modeling: EDA on claims/provider/member datasets; build models for anomaly detection, propensity, cost prediction, utilization, and trend forecasting
• Feature Engineering: Create high value features across eligibility, pricing, provider behavior, and member utilization; contribute to feature store artifacts
• Experimentation: Design offline evaluation, backtesting, and holdout strategies; contribute to A/B testing design
• Quality & Explainability: Apply explainability (e.g., SHAP), calibration, drift checks; ensure reproducibility with MLflow
• Business Engagement: Present insights, model behavior, and tradeoffs to PI, Finance, and Ops
• Engineering Collaboration: Partner with AI/ML Engineers to move models to Jobs/Workflows
• Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree
• 5+ years in Data Science; prior healthcare preferred
• Healthcare analytics exposure (claims, provider, member)
• Solid Python (pandas, numpy, scikit learn; Spark MLlib a plus), PySpark/SQL at scale
• Solid grounding in statistical tests, sampling, validation strategies, and metrics selection

Preferred Qualifications:

• Actuarial & Forecasting Analytics Exposure
• Experience with MLflow/Model Registry and Databricks Feature Store
• Familiarity with Call Center, Provider RCM, and EHR datasets
• Cost of care, actuarial collaboration, or PI/FWA models

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.