Principal Quality Engineer

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.

We are looking for a Principal Quality Engineer to lead the quality, governance, and reliability efforts across our cloud-based enterprise data Lakehouse platform. This role will define and implement the standards, tools, and processes required to ensure that our data is accurate, timely, secure, and dependable. You will work closely with cross-functional teams – including engineering, product, methodology, and governance – to deliver trusted data pipelines and products that meet both business objectives and compliance standards.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Define and drive the quality strategy for data pipelines, curated datasets, and data products across all layers of the Lakehouse
• Act as a thought leader in data quality and governance, influencing architectural decisions and mentoring peers on best practices and emerging trends
• Design and automate validation processes for both raw and enriched data to ensure quality, and to detect schema changes, anomalies, and data gaps
• Ensure all platform and data releases meet defined quality standards prior to production deployment
• Lead or contribute to release assessments, deployment validations, and post-release evaluations
• Design and execute comprehensive test plans for both batch and real-time data pipelines, covering aspects such as latency, event sequencing, data loss, duplication, reprocessing, performance under load, and scalability across large datasets and concurrent workloads
• Collaborate with engineering and product teams to incorporate quality gates throughout the development lifecycle
• Drive lineage, metadata, and change tracking in a data Lakehouse, partnering with governance and security teams to enforce data classification, access, and lifecycle policies-ensuring full traceability and compliance
• Conduct root cause analysis for data issues and lead efforts to implement preventive improvements
• Integrate quality controls into CI/CD pipelines and orchestration workflows
• Foster a solid data quality culture by encouraging ownership and accountability within teams
• 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:

• Hands-on experience implementing or using data validation and quality assurance frameworks
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD practices, automated testing, and data deployment workflows
• Hands-on experience working with healthcare data, including electronic medical records (EMR), claims datasets, and FHIR-based data sources
• Hands-on experience with cloud-based data platforms, with exposure to Microsoft Azure services such as Data Lake, Databricks, Data Factory, and related tools
• Good understanding of modern Data Lakehouse architectures and distributed data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark, Delta Lake)
• Proficiency in SQL and at least one data-centric programming language (e.g., Python or Scala)
• Proven ability to design, automate, and test batch and real-time streaming data pipelines, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance across diverse data workloads

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.