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 in making healthcare work better for everyone through people-led, responsible AI while Caring. Connecting. Growing together
Begin your career at UnitedHealth Group and help make health care work better for everyone. Through our Early Careers programs, you'll gain meaningful experience, tackle real business challenges, and contribute to work that impacts millions of lives.
Across UnitedHealthcare and Optum, we're united by a common purpose: improving the health and well-being of the people and communities we serve. You'll work alongside talented colleagues, develop new skills, and be supported by a culture of innovation, inclusion, and continuous learning.
No matter where your journey starts, you'll have the opportunity to grow, make an impact, and help shape the future of health care.
**The full-time position located in Eden Prairie, MN, Nashville, TN or Washington, DC will be available starting in 2027** **UnitedHealth Group is not able to offer visa sponsorship now or in the future for position** **Relocation is not offered for the Consultant Development Program**
The Consultant Development Program (CDP) is an Early Careers program that launches early-careers professionals into real consulting work, solving problems and shaping outcomes for health care clients from day one. CDP sits within Optum Advisory, giving participants the chance to work with a diverse range of health care clients across multiple engagements. As a CDP participant, you'll join a cohort spanning multiple tracks, all united by a shared focus on serving our clients and making the health system work better for everyone. You’ll complete structured consulting and healthcare training, receive mentorship from experienced leaders, and gain experience across multiple client engagements while developing capabilities in strategic problem solving, data-driven decision making, client relationship management, change management, AI-enabled consulting, and healthcare industry expertise. Program completion includes alignment into an Optum Advisory practice and typically takes 1.5–2.5 years to complete. By combining real client delivery, structured learning, mentorship, healthcare industry specialization, and AI-enabled consulting experiences from day one, CDP provides a differentiated foundation for a long-term consulting career. The AI/ML Engineering track pairs this core consulting foundation with hands-on exposure to building the AI/ML solutions - LLM applications, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and early agentic AI workflows - that increasingly power client engagements, working alongside Optum.ai engineering and data science teams.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Working directly with our internal and external clients to solve complex business problems by performing the following types of activities:
- Enable strategic business transformation through the application of technology, AI, process improvement and innovation to our client’s most complex problems
- Apply and integrate AI tools into client workflows - research, analysis, reporting, dashboards, and automation - building and optimizing prompts along the way
- Lead selected client-facing interactions and presentations, communicate technical recommendations and trade-offs, and build client relationships during project delivery
- Own defined AI/ML workstreams, including requirements analysis, solution development, evaluation, and communication of results
- Develop and fine-tune LLM-based applications for client and internal use cases, including prompt engineering and API integration with commercial and open-source models (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic/Claude, Gemini)
- Design and implement retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and agentic AI workflows - including document ingestion, chunking, embeddings, vector search, tool-use, reasoning, and planning patterns - for defined client use cases
- Test, evaluate, and refine AI/ML solutions for accuracy, safety, and performance, including hallucination detection, bias monitoring, and human-in-the-loop evaluation
- Prepare solutions for production by applying testing, CI/CD, and monitoring practices, and support a clear transition to Optum or client production engineering teams
- Apply responsible-AI and healthcare data considerations (PHI/PII protection, privacy and regulatory requirements, governance guardrails) throughout AI/ML solution development
- Partner with Optum.ai engineering, data science, and product teams to translate client business requirements into technical AI/ML solution components, and communicate progress, risks, and trade-offs to client and internal stakeholders
- Optum Advisory provides consulting support to a wide range of health care clients. Some example projects might include:
- Building a go-to-market strategy and business case to bring a new product or service to market by providing an opportunity analysis derived through complex data navigation
- Designing an AI adoption roadmap to help a health system responsibly scale AI-enabled clinical and administrative tools across the organization
- Designing and building a RAG-based knowledge assistant for a health system’s clinical documentation workflows, from data ingestion through evaluation
- Fine-tuning and integrating an LLM-powered prior authorization assistant for a payer client, including prompt design and evaluation against real case outcomes
- Designing an agentic workflow that automates intake and triage for a provider’s call center, including tool-use, planning, escalation logic, and human-in-the-loop controls
What You’ll Do:
- Apply AI tools to solve business problems within your domain
- Build and optimize prompts for analysis, reporting, and automation
- Integrate AI into workflows (e.g., reporting, dashboards, operations processes)
- Analyze data using AI-enabled tools and generate insights
- Collaborate with teams to identify opportunities for AI-driven improvements
- Ensure responsible and compliant use of AI solutions
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:
- 2+ years of experience through graduate research, internships, fellowships, postdoctoral work, or professional roles in ML, AI engineering, or applied data science
- 2+ years of experience developing Python-based ML/AI solutions
- 1+ years of experience building Generative AI or LLM applications
- Experience taking an ML/AI project from problem definition through development and evaluation
- Experience using AI-assisted development (“vibe coding”) tools such as Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, or similar
- Ability to work in office on a hybrid schedule (3 days in office) in one of our 3 locations (Eden Prairie, MN, Nashville, TN or Washington D.C.) for the duration of the program
- Ability to Travel up to 50% for the Consultant Development Program, dependent on project needs and location
- Must be eligible to work in the U.S. without company sponsorship, now or in the future, for employment-based work authorization (F-1 students with practical training and candidates requiring H-1Bs, TNs, etc. will not be considered) F-1 visa holders with Optional Practical Training (OPT) who will require H-1B status, TNs, or current H-1B visa holders will not be considered. H1-B and green card sponsorship is not available for this position
Preferred Qualifications:
- 3.0 GPA
- 1+ year of experience with RAG, vector search, or similar retrieval-based AI approaches
- Healthcare Experience
- Experience with LLM orchestration frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, or Semantic Kernel
- Experience building or contributing to agentic AI systems, including tool-calling, planning frameworks, or multi-agent workflows
- Experience optimizing LLM latency, cost, and performance in production environments
- Experience deploying AI systems on cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP
- Experience working in regulated environments with responsible AI governance requirements
- Proven intellectual Curiosity
Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer 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 us, you’ll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $72,800 - $130,000 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.
At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. Together, we are shaping the future of healthcare by harnessing technology and innovation to make care simpler to navigate, more affordable and more connected for the people we serve. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcomed, valued, heard and respected, empowering people to bring their authentic selves to work and strengthening our collective impact through diverse talents, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.
UnitedHealth Group and its affiliated brands are an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.
UnitedHealth Group and its affiliated brands are a drug-free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.
