Optum AI PhD Intern - Remote

Internships at Optum. If you want an intern experience that will dramatically shape your career, consider a company that’s dramatically shaping our entire health care system. Optum, part of the UnitedHealth Group family of companies, is a leading health services and innovation company dedicated to helping make the health system work better for everyone. With more than 94,000 people collaborating worldwide, Optum combines people, technology, data and action to improve the delivery, quality and efficiency of health care. Our internship opportunities provide a view of a rapidly evolving, incredibly challenging marketplace of ideas, products and services. Here, you’ll work with some of the smartest people in the business on assignments that matter. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together. 

Optum AI is expanding and seeking Research Interns for Summer 2024 who are interested in advancing the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning and developing novel solutions that improve healthcare outcomes. We encourage individuals who are passionate about advancing the state of the art in deep learning, natural language processing, generative models, reinforcement learning, signal processing, privacy-preserving machine learning, causal inference and related areas to apply. Our team works on the state of the art machine learning in health and has close ties to academia, including collaborations with world experts from UCLA, NYU, and others. 

If hired for this position, you will be working to build innovative new approaches for processing medical claims. This could involve:

• Large language model architectures for legal, regulatory, and medical text
• LLMs and reinforcement learning to successfully drive a multi-step decision process

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

Primary Responsibilities:

• Perform research which advances the state of the art in AI and ML
• Implement algorithms and evaluate their performance on healthcare data
• Communicate results across an interdisciplinary team and explore use cases which improve real world healthcare outcomes
• Document research internally and externally, including publications in machine learning and other scientific conferences and journals

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:

• Currently enrolled in a PhD degree program with a concentration in machine learning, artificial intelligence, data science, computer science, statistics, biomedical informatics or a related field
• Experience in implementing and training machine learning algorithms or statistical analysis
• Deep understanding of the mathematical foundations of machine learning
• Programming competence in Python, R, Java, C , Matlab or another modern programming language
• Familiarity with various deep learning frameworks like PyTorch, Tensorflow etc.
• Fundamental understanding of LLMs and modern deep learning approaches
• Fundamental background in statistical learning theory

Preferred Qualifications:

• Will be completing PhD degree within 1-2 years
• First author publications in NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AISTATS, UAI, AAAI, KDD, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ACL or other computer science conferences or medical journals
• Experience working in an interdisciplinary environment, particularly across engineering and medicine
• Software tool development experience: source control (git), packaging, documentation
• Knowledge and experience working with genomic data, wearables or with medical records data
• Proven solid spoken and written communication skills 
• Demonstrated ability to work in a team

*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group’s Telecommuter Policy

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, or Washington Residents Only: The hourly range for California, Colorado, Connecticut, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island or Washington residents is $47.60 to $63.46 per hour. Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, etc. 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.

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.

Diversity creates a healthier atmosphere: UnitedHealth Group is an Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, protected veteran status, disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by law.

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

Salary : $48 - $63