Senior Software Engineer II

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.  

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design & build backend services that are robust, observable, and secure APIs, data processing pipelines, event driven components, and batch/stream workloads. Optimize for performance, reliability, and cost
• Own distributed systems architecture end to end: partitioning, consistency, fault tolerance, and horizontal scale on modern cloud primitives (containers, serverless, managed data/queue services)
• Productionize GenAI/ML: implement LLM- and RAG backed capabilities (chunking, embeddings, retrieval, reranking, evals), integrate vector stores, and harden for safety, auditability, and PII/PHI protections
• Ship to production continuously: CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, blue/green and canary releases and runbooks
• Lead by example: drive design reviews, mentor engineers, and raise the bar on coding standards, testing depth, and operational excellence
• Partner cross functionally with product, security, data, and platform teams to translate requirements into resilient systems – and communicate tradeoffs clearly and concisely
  How we work
• Pragmatic engineering: bias to iterate, measure, and improve
• “You build it, you run it”: teams own services across design → deploy → operate
• Documentation, design docs, and crisp RFCs before we code
• 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:

• 8+ years in software engineering with a backend focus (Java, Python, or Go) building cloud hosted, distributed systems with production SLAs
• Operational excellence: deep experience with monitoring/alerting, tracing, incident response, postmortems, and performance/cost optimization
• Cloud proficiency: experience with any major cloud provider (AWS preferred) across compute, storage, networking, IAM, and service integration; strong CI/CD and IaC experience
• Data systems: relational + NoSQL data modeling and tuning; queues/streams; caching; schema evolution and migration safety
• AI/ML in production: shipped features using LLMs and RAG (prompting, fine tuning or orchestration), vector DBs, and GenAI safety/observability (prompt injection defenses, content filtering, redaction, evals)
• Leadership: mentorship, technical direction, and effective communication with technical and non technical stakeholders

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.