hybrid
VP, Engineering - AI Platform & Operations
VP, Engineering - AI Platform & Operations
Optum is seeking a Vice President of Engineering to lead the enterprise AI/ML platform strategy and operations. This role involves defining and delivering a scalable, secure, and responsible AI infrastructure, overseeing a global team of engineers, and driving platform adoption and innovation across the organization.
About the role
About the Role
Optum is seeking a visionary and execution-driven Vice President to lead their enterprise AI/ML platform strategy through the AI Platform and Operations team. This leader will be responsible for defining and delivering a scalable, secure, and responsible AI infrastructure that supports development and deployment across the organization. The role requires deep technical expertise, solid cross-functional leadership, and a passion for building high-impact platforms that power real-world AI solutions. The platform is architected for extensibility, enabling future support for broader enterprise data and intelligence ecosystems. This position follows a hybrid schedule with four in-office days per week.
Primary Responsibilities
Strategic Platform Leadership
- Define and evolve the AI Platform vision to support enterprise-wide AI/ML initiatives.
- Align platform capabilities with business priorities, ensuring it serves as the foundation for internal and external AI solutions.
- Drive enterprise-wide adoption via frictionless developer experience, enablement programs, documentation, and communities of practice.
- Define the reference architecture for AI/ML and GenAI (training, fine tuning, retrieval, eval, deployment, monitoring) with clear guardrails for teams to build on top.
Engineering & Execution Oversight
- Lead the design and delivery of a multi-tenant, multi-cloud AI/ML platform: feature store, vector/search, model registry, orchestration, training at scale, inference gateways, evaluation tooling, prompt/guardrail services, and golden paths/templates.
- Define and stand up the MLOps & LLMops infrastructure and operational processes required to scale AI across the enterprise.
- Ensure platform scalability, reliability, and compliance with responsible AI standards.
- Establish product support capabilities and direction to ensure sustained platform adoption and user success.
Organizational Leadership
- Lead a growing global team of 100+ AI/ML and software engineers, fostering a high-performance culture.
- Build and scale a world-class organization with deep expertise in AI infrastructure and platform engineering.
- Promote innovation, accountability, and collaboration across distributed teams.
- Foster a high performance, inclusive culture with clear expectations, coaching, career paths, and succession planning.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner with product, data, security, finance and compliance teams to ensure seamless integration of the AI Platform into the broader technology ecosystem.
- Represent the platform in executive forums and strategic planning discussions.
- Serve as a thought leader on AI infrastructure and platform strategy.
Required Qualifications
- 15+ years of experience in engineering or platform leadership, with some direct experience working on AI/ML infrastructure.
- Proven track record of building and scaling enterprise-grade platforms.
- Deep expertise in MLOps/LLMops, orchestration, cloud-native architecture, and AI governance.
- Proven cross functional leadership and executive communication; ability to influence at Board/executive level.
- Track record of scaling platforms (multi tenant, multi region) with solid SLOs and cost discipline (FinOps).
- Excellent communication and executive presence.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in commercializing AI platforms or enabling external client delivery.
- Familiarity with regulatory and ethical considerations in AI deployment.
- Ability to operate at both strategic and tactical levels.