Senior Data Engineer

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 diversity and inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health equity on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

You will enjoy the flexibility to telecommute* from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Lead and scale data engineering teams
• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of data engineers across multiple experience levels
• Set technical direction, establish best practices, and conduct design and code reviews
• Partner with product, analytics, data science, and platform teams to deliver business outcomes
• Architect and deliver enterprise-scale data platforms
• Design, build, and evolve scalable data architectures using Spark, Databricks, and Snowflake
• Own end-to-end data pipelines for batch and streaming ingestion
• Ensure high availability, performance, and cost efficiency of data platforms
• Data pipeline and platform ownership
• Develop and oversee robust data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration pipelines
• Implement and enforce data quality, validation, normalization, and reconciliation frameworks
• Establish and maintain data lineage, metadata management, and observability
• Enable analytics, ML, and feature development
• Build and manage feature stores and curated data layers for analytics and ML use cases
• Partner with data science teams to productionize ML data pipelines
• Support self-service analytics and data democratization initiatives
• Governance, security, and compliance
• Implement data governance standards including access control, encryption, and auditability
• Ensure compliance with enterprise and regulatory requirements (e.g., HIPAA)
• Define SLAs, SLOs, and operational monitoring for data systems
• Strategic planning and execution
• Drive roadmap planning, capacity planning, and prioritization for data engineering initiatives
• Evaluate and onboard new tools and technologies
• Influence data strategy and platform modernization efforts at the enterprise level

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

Required Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience in the following:
  • Modern data engineering stacks
  • Apache Spark, Databricks, Snowflake
  • Data ingestion frameworks and large-scale ETL/ELT pipelines
  • Cloud platforms
  • Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP
  • Data modeling and storage
  • Dimensional modeling, normalized and denormalized schemas
  • Data lakes, lake house architecture, and data warehouses
  • Data quality and governance
  • Data quality frameworks, anomaly detection, data validation
  • Data lineage, metadata management, and cataloging tools
  • Kafka, Kinesis, Event Hubs, or similar technologies
  • Workflow orchestration
  • Airflow, Databricks Workflows, Prefect, or similar tools
  • Programming
  • Python and/or Scala
  • Advanced SQL for analytics and transformations
  • DevOps and platform engineering
  • CI/CD for data pipelines
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM)
  • Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes - preferred)
  • Leading high-performing data engineering teams
• 3+ years of experience in a technical leadership or people management role

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree
• Experience in streaming and real-time data

Soft Skills:

• Ability to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions
• Experience driving architectural decisions and influencing senior leadership
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills

*All Telecommuters 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 $91,700 to $163,700 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. 

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 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.

UnitedHealth Group is 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 is a drug - free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.

#RPO #GREEN