Lead Data Analyst - Azure Databricks and Healthcare Domain

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 an experienced and results‑driven Lead Data Analyst with 10+ years of experience in advanced analytics, healthcare data analysis, and cloud‑based data platforms, with approximately 30% hands‑on data engineering responsibilities.

This role is accountable for driving insights, decision support, and analytical outcomes across Claims Payment Integrity, Actuarial analytics, and Forecasting, while also contributing to the design and enablement of analytical data pipelines using Azure Databricks and modern lakehouse architectures.

The ideal candidate brings solid analytical depth, healthcare domain knowledge, and practical engineering skills-combined with the ability to lead analytical initiatives, mentor analysts, and partner closely with business and data engineering teams to deliver high‑impact, data‑driven solutions.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Analytics & Insights Leadership (Primary Focus)
  • Lead end‑to‑end analytical initiatives, from business problem definition through insight generation and executive‑ready outputs
  • Design and deliver analytical datasets, KPIs, metrics, and dashboards using Databricks SQL and PySpark
  • Translate complex healthcare, claims, and financial data into clear, actionable insights and recommendations for senior leadership
  • Support medical cost trend analysis, risk identification, savings validation, leakage analysis, and forecasting accuracy improvements
• Healthcare Data Analysis
  • Perform advanced analysis on large‑scale healthcare data, including:
    • Claims and Payment Integrity datasets
    • Actuarial and forecasting data
    • EMR/EHR‑adjacent healthcare data
    • Partner with payment integrity, actuarial, finance, and clinical stakeholders to understand analytical needs and shape insight‑driven solutions
    • Validate business rules, assumptions, calculation logic, and analytical methodologies used in reporting and models
• Data Engineering & Platform Enablement (Secondary skills)
  • Contribute hands‑on to the development and optimization of analytical data pipelines in Databricks using PySpark and SQL
  • Collaborate with data engineering teams to:
  • Define data models and analytical layer requirements
  • Improve data availability, quality, and performance for analytics use cases
  • Optimize queries, transformations, and datasets for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency within lakehouse and warehouse environments.
  • Support data readiness for downstream use cases including BI reporting, AI/ML, and executive analytics
• Governance, Quality & Compliance
  • Implement and enforce data quality checks, controls, and documentation for analytical datasets
  • Ensure compliance with HIPAA, HITRUST, and enterprise data governance standards
  • Support metadata management, lineage, and access controls using Unity Catalog and related enterprise tooling
• Leadership & Mentorship
  • Mentor and guide data analysts and senior analysts, promoting best practices in analytics, storytelling, and validation
  • Review analytical deliverables for accuracy, clarity, and business relevance
  • Act as a thought partner to business leaders, influencing decisions through data and insights
• 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 regard 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:

• 10+ years of experience in data analytics, business intelligence, or advanced healthcare analytics, with meaningful hands‑on data engineering exposure
• Solid expertise in:
  • Databricks
  • Advanced SQL
  • PySpark for analytical and transformation workloads
• Proven experience working with:
  • Claims and Payment Integrity data
  • Actuarial and forecasting datasets
• Experience with Snowflake, BigQuery, or similar analytical data platforms
• Solid understanding of Azure and GCP analytics services, including:
  • Azure Data Factory, Synapse
  • Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Composer (working knowledge)
• Solid communication skills and the ability to present insights to senior and executive audiences.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or related field.
• Experience supporting:
  • Payment Integrity savings estimation and validation
  • Actuarial modeling or medical cost forecasting
• Familiarity with analytics and orchestration tooling such as:
  • Airflow
  • dbt
  • BI platforms (Power BI, Tableau, Looker)
• Certifications in Databricks, Snowflake, Azure, or GCP
• Experience with healthcare payers, provider systems, or healthcare analytics organizations

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.

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