Director Software Engineering

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.

Optum is seeking a Director, Software Engineering based in Gurugram/Noida/Hyderabad to lead a multi-team engineering organization responsible for the design, build, and reliable operation of enterprise-scale platforms serving millions of members and internal partners.

This is a hands-on leadership role in a global delivery model. You will own the people agenda for your organization in India - hiring, coaching, performance, and org design - while remaining the accountable technical decision-maker for solution and architecture choices within your domain. You will set and enforce the reliability bar for your platforms through modern Site Reliability Engineering practices, drive cloud-native modernization, and lead practical AI adoption across both the products you build and the way your teams engineer them.

You will partner daily with product, architecture, security, and business leaders, and are expected to hold technical authority in those forums rather than act as a delivery conduit.

Primary Responsibilities:

• People Leadership
  • Lead, coach, and develop a multi-team engineering organization; own hiring, onboarding, performance management, succession planning, and retention
  • Operate a global delivery model with US-based counterparts: clear ownership boundaries, follow-the-sun handoffs, and equitable on-call distribution across time zones
• Site Reliability Engineering
  • Own reliability, availability, performance, and operational readiness for all platforms in the portfolio
  • Establish and govern SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets; use error-budget policy to drive engineering priority decisions
  • Mature the observability stack (metrics, logs, traces, synthetic monitoring) and drive measurable reduction in MTTD and MTTR
  • Own incident management for the domain: severity triage, executive communication during major incidents, blameless postmortems, and closure of corrective actions
  • Drive toil reduction and automation; set and track deployment frequency, change failure rate, automated remediation coverage, and unplanned work percentage
  • Embed resiliency engineering - capacity planning, failure-mode analysis, chaos/DR exercises, validated RTO/RPO
  • Ensure production systems meet enterprise security, audit, and regulatory control requirements (HIPAA, PHI/PII handling and SOX where applicable)
• Solution & Technical Decision-Making
  • Act as the accountable decision-maker for solution and architecture decisions within the domain: build vs. buy, platform selection, service boundaries, integration patterns, and data flows
  • Establish and enforce reference architectures, engineering standards, review practices, and non-functional requirements across teams
  • Own the technical debt and modernization backlog; make explicit, documented trade-offs between speed, cost, risk, and maintainability
  • Run architecture review and design authority forums for the domain; align with Enterprise Architecture on cross-domain decisions
  • Produce clear decision records and defend technical directions to executive stakeholders in business terms (cost, risk, time-to-market, member impact)
• Cloud & Platform Engineering
  • Lead cloud-native design and delivery on public cloud (Azure preferred; AWS/GCP considered) containers/AKS, serverless, API management, event-driven architectures
  • Lead migration and modernization of legacy and on-premises workloads to cloud-native targets
  • Own cloud cost management and FinOps discipline for the portfolio, including unit economics and demonstrated optimization
  • Mature CI/CD and DevSecOps pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery (blue/green, canary, feature flags)
• Artificial Intelligence
  • Lead integration of AI/ML and GenAI capabilities into products and platforms, from use-case selection through production operation and monitoring
  • Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering tooling across the organization and hold teams accountable to measurable productivity and quality outcomes
  • Apply responsible AI practices with Legal, Compliance, and Security - model governance, evaluation, human-in-the-loop design, bias and drift monitoring, data-use controls
  • Distinguish credible AI opportunities from hype and make disciplined investment recommendations to leadership
• 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, or a related field (B.E./B. Tech or equivalent)
• 14+ years of progressive professional software engineering experience, including designing and delivering large-scale, production, enterprise-grade distributed systems
• 6+ years of direct people management experience leading software engineering teams, including 3+ years managing other managers or leading multiple teams concurrently
• 4+ years of experience owning production reliability and operations at scale, applying SRE practices such as SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident command, and toil/automation reduction
• 4+ years of experience as the accountable technical decision-maker for solution or architecture direction across multiple teams - establishing reference architectures, engineering standards, and build-vs-buy recommendations
• 4+ years of hands-on experience delivering on enterprise public cloud (Azure preferred; AWS or GCP considered), including containerized microservices, API design, event-driven patterns, and infrastructure-as-code
• 2+ years of experience delivering AI/ML or GenAI-enabled capabilities into production, and/or driving organizational adoption of AI-assisted engineering tooling
• 2+ years of experience establishing engineering standards and driving adoption of modern DevOps/CI-CD and DevSecOps pipelines across multiple teams
• Demonstrated experience operating in a global delivery model with US or European stakeholders, with proven ability to hold technical ownership rather than act solely as an offshore delivery lead
• Demonstrated experience managing an engineering budget and/or cloud spend
• Proven ability to operate independently with high ownership and sound judgment in a complex, matrixed organization
• Proven solid written and verbal communication skills, including executive-level presentation and influence

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's
• Current or previous experience in US healthcare (payer, provider, PBM) or another regulated industry
• Experience with event-streaming platforms (Kafka) and modern data platforms (Databricks, Delta Lake, Snowflake)
• Experience scaling an engineering organization in India through significant headcount growth
• Experience with agentic AI frameworks, LLM application patterns (RAG, evaluation harnesses), and vector databases
• Experience with FinOps practices and demonstrated cloud cost optimization outcomes
• Experience partnering with Security, Risk, and Compliance functions on audit and regulatory obligations
• Knowledge of healthcare data standards such as FHIR, EDI, claims, or benefits

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.