Data Engineering Consultant - AI Platform

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're looking for a hands-on Senior Data Engineer - AI Platforms to build and scale AI-ready data platforms that power AI/ML, Generative AI, Agentic AI, analytics, and intelligent enterprise applications. This role focuses on engineering modern data platforms, data products, semantic foundations, and scalable data pipelines that enable AI systems to consume trusted, governed, and context-rich data.

The ideal candidate brings solid expertise in data engineering, distributed processing, modern cloud data platforms, and AI-centric data foundations. You will work closely with Data Architects, AI/ML Engineers, Applied Scientists, and Platform Engineers to deliver data platforms that support model training, inference, RAG, semantic retrieval, and enterprise AI applications.

Primary Responsibilities:

AI Data Platform Engineering

• Build and enhance AI-ready data platforms supporting AI/ML, Generative AI, Agentic AI, analytics, and operational workloads
• Develop scalable data pipelines spanning:
  • Data ingestion
  • Data transformation
  • Data processing
  • Data serving
  • Data consumption
  • Implement modern data architectures using:
  • Lakehouse
  • Data Lake
  • Data Warehouse
  • Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold)
• Support data platforms that enable model training, inference, feature engineering, RAG, and enterprise AI applications

Data Engineering & Processing

• Develop high-performance pipelines supporting structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data
• Build batch, streaming, and real-time processing solutions using modern distributed data technologies
• Implement scalable data processing frameworks utilizing:
  • Apache Spark
  • PySpark
  • Kafka
  • Cloud-native data services
• Optimize data storage, partitioning, indexing, and query performance for scalability and cost efficiency
• Implement resilient data processing patterns including checkpointing, retries, recovery mechanisms, and data validation

AI Data Foundations

• Build and maintain AI-ready datasets, feature pipelines, and data products
• Develop embedding generation pipelines and vectorized data preparation workflows
• Support semantic search, retrieval, and RAG use cases through efficient data engineering practices
• Enable AI data readiness through:
  • Data quality management
  • Feature engineering
  • Data enrichment
  • Metadata management
  • Semantic indexing
• Contribute to building semantic data layers that provide business context and improve AI consumption of enterprise data

Data Governance & Security

• Implement data governance standards covering:
  • Metadata management
  • Data lineage
  • Data quality
  • Data cataloging
  • Data stewardship
• Support compliance with HIPAA, GDPR, PII protection, and enterprise governance standards
• Implement secure data access controls using:
  • RBAC
  • Encryption
  • Data masking
  • Auditing
• Ensure data platforms meet security, privacy, and regulatory requirements

Platform Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Implement monitoring, logging, lineage tracking, alerting, and operational dashboards for data platforms
• Support platform scalability, reliability, performance, and operational efficiency
• Contribute to DataOps practices including:
  • CI/CD for data pipelines
  • Automated testing
  • Deployment automation
  • Data observability
• Troubleshoot production issues and support continuous improvement initiatives

Collaboration & Innovation

• Partner with AI/ML Engineers, Data Scientists, Applied Scientists, Architects, and Platform Teams to deliver AI-ready data solutions
• Contribute to reusable engineering frameworks, shared services, and platform accelerators
• Support adoption of emerging technologies across AI data platforms, semantic retrieval, and modern data ecosystems
• Participate in architecture discussions and contribute to enterprise engineering standards
• 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:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Systems, Data Engineering, or related field
• 8+ years of experience in Data Engineering, Data Platforms, Analytics Engineering, or related disciplines
• Experience building and operating enterprise-scale data pipelines and data platforms
• Experience implementing modern data architectures including Data Lakes, Lakehouse, Data Warehouses, and Medallion Architecture
• Experience developing data pipelines supporting AI/ML and analytics workloads
• Experience working with structured, semi-structured, and unstructured datasets
• Experience with metadata management, data quality, lineage, and governance practices
• Experience implementing CI/CD, automated testing, and DataOps practices
• Solid experience with:
  • Databricks
  • Snowflake
  • Apache Spark
  • PySpark
  • SQL
  • Python
• Solid understanding of distributed processing, scalability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization
• Understanding of security, privacy, and compliance requirements for enterprise data platforms
• Familiarity with feature engineering, embeddings, semantic search, vectorized data, and AI-ready data foundations
• Proven solid analytical, communication, problem-solving, and collaboration skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with Databricks Lakehouse Platform, Snowflake Data Cloud, Delta Lake, Apache Iceberg, and cloud-native data platforms
• Experience building AI-ready data platforms that support AI/ML, Generative AI, Agentic AI, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workloads
• Experience developing feature stores, embedding pipelines, semantic indexing solutions, and AI data products
• Experience with vector databases, semantic retrieval platforms, and enterprise search solutions
• Experience implementing batch, streaming, and event-driven architectures using Kafka and related technologies
• Experience working with cloud platforms including Azure, AWS, or GCP
• Experience contributing to reusable data frameworks, platform accelerators, and shared engineering services
• Experience within healthcare, financial services, insurance, banking, or other regulated industries
• Experience mentoring junior engineers and contributing to engineering best practices
• Solid understanding of DataOps, data observability, automated data quality, and platform engineering practices
• Familiarity with semantic layers, knowledge graphs, ontology-driven models, and context-aware data architectures

Technical Stack

• Data Platforms: Databricks, BigQuery, Snowflake, Azure Synapse, Delta Lake
• Processing: Apache Spark, PySpark, Spark SQL
• Streaming: Kafka, Spark Streaming, Event Hub, Kinesis
• Storage: S3, ADLS, GCS, Parquet, ORC
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, NoSQL
• AI Data Layer: Pinecone, ChromaDB, FAISS, embeddings, semantic search, RAG pipelines
• Orchestration: Airflow, Azure Data Factory, dbt
• Programming: Python, SQL
• Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP
• DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub Actions)
• Observability & Governance: Monitoring, logging, lineage, data catalogs
• Security & Compliance: RBAC, IAM, encryption, masking
• Integration: REST APIs, microservices

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.