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.
As a Principal Conversational AI Designer, you will lead the design of conversational experiences that help consumers accomplish their goals through UnitedHealth Group's AI-powered products and services. Working closely with product, engineering, and subject matter experts, you'll define conversation strategies and design user interactions that are useful, effective, and aligned with business objectives.
Primary Responsibilities:
- Conversation Design and Architecture: Apply conversation design expertise, including Agentic AI, to create intuitive, effective and scalable AI interactions
- Thought Leadership: Develop strategies that ensure AI interactions are clear, accurate, helpful and aligned with organizational objectives. Elevate conversation design thought leadership within the organization
- Leadership and Mentoring: Provide coaching and mentorship to conversation designers and cross-functional partners. Influence team culture, processes and ways of working. Skillfully navigate ambiguity to help others get clarity and alignment
- Define and Guide Best Practices: Leverage conversation design and AI knowledge to influence and define best practices for prompt engineering, styling and design documentation for various personas that embody brand values.
- Advanced Technical Integration: Leverage AI tools throughout the product design life cycle to improve quality and efficiency, in addition to defining design tool features needed to support effective prompt design iteration and testing
- Personalization in AI Design: Anticipate user needs and use cases using design methods that proactively adapt to individual users over time, creating more relevant and meaningful interactions
- Cross-functional Orchestration: Frame challenging problems, gather requirements and propose sophisticated design solutions by serving as a guiding voice on conversation design best practices across product, engineering and operations teams, aligning diverse stakeholders around cohesive user experiences
- Performance Optimization: Collaborate with product teams to define and test state of the art analytics approaches to measure conversation effectiveness, identify opportunities for improvement and quantify business impact
- 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
Your work will significantly impact the members we serve by establishing new standards for accessibility, health literacy and conversational design excellence across our products and services, ultimately creating more intuitive, helpful and trusted AI interactions.
Required Qualifications:
- 8+ years of hands-on experience designing highly complex chat and voice conversational experiences
- Adept at crafting conversations and logic that align to the strategy while following voice, tone and brand standards
- Demonstrated ability to partner with engineering, product and business stakeholders to translate insights into conversational solutions, and designs into production-ready AI experiences
- Solid understanding of large language models (LLMs), generative AI systems, AI agents and conversational architectures
- Proven ability to influence strategy and lead cross-functional initiatives in ambiguous and rapidly evolving environments
- Digital portfolio or work samples of relevant conversational AI projects
Preferred Qualifications:
- Experience contributing to scalable frameworks and conversational design patterns
- Experience creating, iterating and tuning AI personas
- Knowledge of ethical AI standards including bias, fairness and transparency
- Working knowledge of Figma (or comparable design programs) and prototyping tools
- Experience working in a clinical, healthcare or health insurance setting
- Demonstrated ability to write for accessibility, health literacy and/or plain language guidelines
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.