Site Reliability Engineer – AWS, Terraform, Python

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 seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to join our team and help maintain and improve the reliability, scalability, and security of our cloud infrastructure. This is an excellent opportunity for someone early in their SRE career who wants to work with modern cloud technologies and gain hands-on experience managing production infrastructure at scale.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Cloud Infrastructure Maintenance
  • You will be responsible for regular maintenance and upgrades of our cloud components, including but not limited to:
    • Core Infrastructure:
      • RDS Aurora (PostgreSQL) upgrades and maintenance
      • EKS (Kubernetes) cluster upgrades and node pool management
      • EC2 instance patching and maintenance
    • Data Infrastructure:
      • Redshift serverless cluster maintenance
      • AWS Glue jobs and crawlers management
      • Kinesis streams and Firehose delivery streams monitoring
    • Application Infrastructure:
      • Lambda function runtime upgrades and optimization
      • API Gateway configuration and maintenance
      • Application Load Balancer (ALB) management
      • CloudFront distributions and WAF rule updates
    • Storage & Data Services:
      • S3 bucket lifecycle policies and versioning
      • DynamoDB table maintenance and scaling
      • AWS Backup job monitoring and validation
      • EBS volume management and snapshots
    • Networking:
      • VPC peering connections maintenance
      • Network ACL and Security Group updates
      • VPN and Direct Connect monitoring
      • Private endpoints and PrivateLink management
    • Security Services:
      • AWS Secrets Manager rotation and access
      • KMS key management and rotation
      • Guard Duty findings remediation
      • Cognito user pool management
    • Observability & Logging:
      • CloudWatch log groups and metric alarms
      • Elasticsearch (OpenSearch) cluster maintenance
      • FluentBit logging pipeline management
      • AWS Config rule compliance
    • Messaging & Streaming:
      • SQS queue monitoring and dead-letter queue management
      • SNS topic subscription management
      • Event Bridge rule maintenance
• Security & Compliance Management
  • You will help ensure our infrastructure meets enterprise security standards:
    • Secure Code Vulnerabilities: Review and remediate security findings from code scanning tools
    • Cloud Configuration Vulnerabilities: Address misconfigurations identified by AWS Config, SecurityHub, and other compliance tools
    • Cloud Vulnerabilities: Patch EC2 instances, update container images, and respond to AWS security bulletins
    • Compliance Reporting: Maintain documentation and evidence for security audits
• Employee Access Management
  • You will manage access requests to various systems. While proficiency is not required (we have comprehensive runbooks), familiarity is a plus:
    • Salesforce – CRM platform access management
    • Nice CX One – Contact center platform
    • Skedulo – Workforce management system
    • Athena EHR – Electronic health records system
    • Twilio – Communications platform
    • AWS Resources – IAM roles, policies, and resource access
• Infrastructure Support & Troubleshooting
  • You will work with development teams to:
    • Investigate and resolve infrastructure-related incidents
    • Troubleshoot application deployment issues
    • Optimize infrastructure costs and performance
    • Recommend appropriate infrastructure solutions for new application requirements
    • Create and maintain runbooks and documentation
    • Participate in on-call rotation for production support
• 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:

• 1+ years of experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred)
• Basic understanding of infrastructure as code concepts
• Familiarity with version control systems (Git)
• Proven solid troubleshooting and problem-solving skills
• Proven excellent communication skills and ability to work collaboratively
• Proven eagerness to learn and adapt to new technologies
• Tech Stack experience or Knowledge
  • AWS – Our primary cloud platform
  • Terraform – Infrastructure as Code for managing all cloud resources
  • PostgreSQL (RDS) – Our primary database platform

Preferred Qualifications:

• AWS certifications (Solutions Architect Associate, SysOps Administrator, etc.)
• Experience with Terraform or other IaC tools (CloudFormation, Pulumi, etc.)
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, etc.)
• Scripting experience in Python, Bash, or PowerShell
• Database administration experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases
• Experience with incident management and on-call support
• Tech Stack experience or knowledge
  • C# – Primary language used by application teams
  • Python – Additional language used by application teams
  • Node.Js – Additional language used by application teams
• Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS)
• Knowledge of monitoring and observability tools (CloudWatch, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana)
• Understanding of networking concepts (VPC, subnets, routing, load balancing)

What You’ll Learn

This role offers excellent growth opportunities to develop expertise in:

• Large-scale AWS infrastructure management
• Infrastructure as Code best practices with Terraform
• Kubernetes or EKS operations and cluster management
• Security compliance and vulnerability management
• Incident response and postmortem processes
• Cross-functional collaboration with development teams
• SRE principles including SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets

Work Environment

• Collaborative team environment with experienced SREs
• Modern tools and technologies
• Opportunities for professional development and certification
• Participation in on-call rotation (with mentorship and runbook support)

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.