Data Engineering Consultant

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 Data Engineer to support the reliability, monitoring, and continuous improvement of enterprise data pipelines across the Medusa ecosystem and its upstream dependencies (Atlas, Falcon, IEX).

This role focuses on ensuring data availability, stability, and transparency for workforce planning and reporting. The ideal candidate will operate across the full data lifecycle-monitoring pipeline health, investigating issues, supporting incident recovery, and improving data processes-while contributing to long-term platform optimization on Azure and related technologies.

This is a hands-on role that blends data engineering, analytics, and operational ownership, with an emphasis on maintaining trusted, production-ready data.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Monitor Data Health & Pipeline Behavior
  • Track daily data pipeline execution across Medusa and planning systems, ensuring data refreshes are timely, complete, and within expected thresholds
  • Identify anomalies such as missing data, delays, or unexpected metric fluctuations
  • Perform operational checks to validate data readiness for downstream planning and reporting
• Build & Maintain Monitoring Solutions
  • Develop and maintain reporting dashboards (e.g., Power BI) that clearly indicate system health and data readiness
  • Improve visibility into pipeline execution, refresh timing, and completion status
  • Enable proactive issue detection to reduce reliance on reactive troubleshooting
• Investigate Data Issues & Job Failures
  • Perform root cause analysis on data discrepancies, job failures, and pipeline delays
  • Trace dependencies across interconnected systems (Medusa, Atlas, Falcon, IEX)
  • Identify recurring patterns in failures and recommend corrective actions
• Support Incident Triage & Recovery
  • Help determine root cause vs. downstream impact during incidents
  • Execute recovery actions including job reruns, data validation, and coordination with stakeholders
  • Communicate issue status, impact, and next steps clearly to both technical and business partners
• Optimize & Improve Data Processes
  • Refactor queries, stored procedures, and pipelines to improve performance, stability, and maintainability
  • Contribute to designing modular and scalable data processes
  • Identify opportunities to reduce failure points and improve monitoring coverage
• Contribute to Technical Execution Across Lifecycle
  • Support build → test → deploy → monitor → troubleshoot workflows
  • Collaborate with engineers and analysts to improve pipeline design and reliability
  • Assist in transitioning legacy processes toward more scalable and maintainable architectures
• 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:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent experience)
• 4+ years of experience working with enterprise data pipelines or data engineering workflows
• Relevant experience in data engineering, analytics engineering, or data operations roles
• Solid SQL skills and experience troubleshooting data discrepancies in production environments
• Experience working with ETL/ELT pipelines and scheduled batch processing systems
• Proven ability to debug complex data issues across multiple interconnected systems
• Experience building dashboards or monitoring tools (Power BI or similar) to track data health
• Understanding of data warehouse concepts, including dimensional modeling (star/snowflake schemas)
• Ability to communicate technical issues clearly in both technical and business-friendly language

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Azure data platform tools (Data Factory, Databricks, Synapse, Data Lake)
• Familiarity with Snowflake or cloud-based data warehousing solutions
• Experience supporting production data environments with SLA-driven requirements
• Exposure to data pipeline observability, logging, or monitoring frameworks
• Ability to quickly learn domain-specific data models and business processes

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.