Lead Site Reliability Engineer - Remote

Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us in making healthcare work better for everyone through people-led, responsible AI while Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

As a Lead Site Reliability Engineer within Global Technology Services at Optum, you will define the reliability strategy and technical direction for enterprise agentic AI systems built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) utilizing the Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) framework. In this role, you will lead and mentor a high-performing engineering team, championing high availability, observability, automation, and security across modern containerized architectures. You will partner closely with AI/ML engineering, security, and product leaders to embed resilience into next-generation AI platforms, drive a blameless postmortem culture, and pioneer AIOps capabilities that keep critical health services performant, reliable, and secure.

You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges. For all hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area, you will be required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week.

Primary Responsibilities: 

• Lead, mentor, and grow the Site Reliability Engineering team, setting operational priorities, technical coaching, and career development pathways
• Define and execute the SRE vision, roadmap, and operating model for agentic AI systems, establishing reliability standards, SLOs, error budgets, and production-readiness reviews
• Architect for high availability, scalability, and resilience across containerized workloads on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) utilizing Cloud Run
• Establish comprehensive observability strategies spanning metrics, logs, traces, and AI-specific telemetry, including token cost, model latency, agent quality, and tool-call failure rates
• Act as the senior technical escalation lead for major incidents, commanding production war rooms, driving blameless postmortems, and ensuring corrective actions are completed
• Partner with AI/ML engineering, platform, security, and product leaders to incorporate reliability, CI/CD, and infrastructure as code (Terraform) into early design phases
• Lead the AIOps strategy by designing, developing, and deploying AI agents built with the Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) to automate incident triage, remediation, build analysis, and self-healing with human-in-the-loop controls
• Drive capacity planning, performance tuning, and FinOps cost optimization across cloud compute and model inference workloads

You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

Required Qualifications: 

• 12+ years of experience in SRE, DevOps, platform engineering, or distributed systems infrastructure
• 3+ years of experience leading, mentoring, or managing technical engineering teams
• Demonstrated experience architecting and operating containerized solutions on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including Cloud Run, IAM, networking, and Cloud Operations Suite
• Advanced proficiency with Docker containerization and Infrastructure as Code using Terraform
• Demonstrated programming and scripting proficiency with Python and automated CI/CD pipelines
• Proven experience defining observability strategies using tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, or Splunk
• Proven experience with cloud identity, access management, and enterprise SSO protocols (OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML)
• Demonstrated track record leading major incident management, war rooms, and blameless postmortems for business-critical production systems

Preferred Qualifications:  

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related technical field, or 8+ years of equivalent practical engineering experience
• Experience architecting, orchestrating, or scaling agentic workflows and multi-agent systems using the Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) or Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Experience architecting reliability, observability, or evaluation frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic systems (e.g., Vertex AI, Gemini, LangSmith, Langfuse, Arize)
• Knowledge of AI security risk mitigation (such as prompt injection and OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications), Policy as Code (OPA), and container supply chain security (Binary Authorization, Sigstore)
• Active cloud or container certifications (e.g., Google Cloud Certified Professional Cloud Architect, Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer, CKA, or CKS)
• Experience operating within healthcare or other highly regulated environments, including HIPAA compliance

*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy.

Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer benefits such as, a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). No matter where or when you begin a career with us, you'll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $112,700 - $193,200 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.

Application Deadline: This will be posted for a minimum of 2 business days or until a sufficient candidate pool has been collected. Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.

At UnitedHealth Group, our mission is to help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. Together, we are shaping the future of healthcare by harnessing technology and innovation to make care simpler to navigate, more affordable and more connected for the people we serve. We are committed to creating an inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcomed, valued, heard and respected, empowering people to bring their authentic selves to work and strengthening our collective impact through diverse talents, backgrounds, experiences and perspectives.

UnitedHealth Group and its affiliated brands are an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.

UnitedHealth Group and its affiliated brands are a drug-free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.