Senior Software Engineer I

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.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design, implement and maintain highly scalable microservices within all phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) on Microsoft Azure and AWS
• Establish, refine and integrate CI/ CD, feature testing automation, performance testing as needed
• Design, build, and optimize data ingestion and transformation pipelines on Azure Databricks (Spark/Delta Lake) with attention to performance, cost, and operational simplicity
• Implement streaming and batch data patterns; leverage CDC approaches and eventing/orchestration using services such as messaging/eventing and workflow orchestration tools (as applicable in the ecosystem)
• Engineer high-quality PySpark code and SQL; enforce coding standards and enable reuse through shared libraries and notebooks
• Build/extend APIs and microservices that expose curated data for real-time and near-real-time use cases; ensure backward compatibility and strong observability
• Contribute to CI/CD practices (pipelines and deployment automation), infrastructure-as-code exposure, secrets management, and automated testing for data and services
• Partner with architects/SMEs to migrate workloads to cloud-native paradigms with clear SLAs and operational expectations
• Instrument solutions with end-to-end monitoring and alerting; drive MTTR reduction through runbooks, dashboards, and actionable alerts
• Collaborate with business and platform teams to onboard new consumers, define data contracts, and scale solutions for growth in volume and usage
• Contribute to data governance (catalog, lineage, access controls) and ensure compliance with enterprise standards
• Participate in on-call/production support rotations; perform root-cause analysis and preventive hardening to maintain reliability and SLA adherence
• Document designs, patterns, and operational guides to enable consistent delivery and rapid onboarding across teams
• 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:

• Graduate or Postgraduate in Computer Science /Engineering/Science/Mathematics or related field with 6+ years of solid software engineering experience
• Hands-on experience with Azure Databricks (Spark, Delta Lake) and strong PySpark + SQL skills for large-scale data processing
• Experience building event-driven and batch data flows (orchestration + compute) and integrating with cloud services for reliable delivery
• Experience with developing applications using Azure Kubernetes service (AKS), Service Fabric, App Service, function, azure Storage, service bus queues, event hubs, application gateway etc.
• Experience to design and implement highly scalable Restful microservices
• Experience in automating all deployment steps with Infrastructure as Code (IAC), CI/ CD pipelines using Git Action, terraform, MLOps etc.
• Experience to define guidelines and benchmarks for NFR considerations during project implementation
• API engineering experience (REST and/or gRPC), contract versioning, and service observability (logs, metrics, traces)
• Good understanding of Infrastructure as code
• Familiarity with secrets/access management practices and role-based access controls in data platforms
• CI/CD exposure (Azure pipelines or equivalent), including test automation and deployment strategies for data and services
• Proficient in AI tools like copilot, AI automation and productivity, knowledge in LLM, agentic AI framework
• Proven production mindset: on-call readiness, incident response, and proactive post-incident improvements to protect SLAs for a large consumer base
• Proven ability to design for reliability: idempotency, retries, transactional writes, schema evolution, and operating at scale (performance and cost tuning)
• Proven quick learner and highly motivated team player and a self-starter. Should be able to learn new technology and able to deliver the work in short duration
• Proven excellent verbal and written communication skills. Solid collaborator within and across multiple teams
• Demonstrated ability to do required POCs to make sure that suggested design/technologies meet the requirements
• Demonstrated ability to envision the overall solution for defined functional and non-functional requirements; and be able to define technologies, patterns and frameworks to materialize it
• Demonstrated ability to design and develop the framework of the system and be able to explain choices made. Also write and review design document explaining overall architecture, framework and high-level design of the application
• Demonstrated ability to create, understand and validate Design and estimated effort for given module/task, and be able to justify it
• Demonstrated ability to define in-scope, out-of-scope and taken assumptions while creating effort estimates
• Demonstrated ability to identify and integrate well over all integration points in context of a project as well as other applications in the environment
• AI Expectations:
  • Proficient in AI tools like copilot, AI automation and productivity, knowledge in LLM, agentic AI framework 
  • Proven ability to utilize AI tools and applications to perform tasks, make decisions and enhance their work and overall cloud migration velocity. Expected to use AI Powered software for data analysis, coding, and overall productivity

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with Azure DevOps governance and enterprise controls
• Experience migrating data/workloads to cloud; healthcare/claims domain exposure
• Health care industry experience
• Fundamental core ML and DL knowledge, NLP
• Knowledge of Delta Live Tables, Structured Streaming, or Kafka-based ingestion patterns
• Knowledge of Data quality frameworks (expectations, unit tests) and lineage/catalog tooling
• Knowledge of performance engineering for Spark (partitioning, caching, join optimization, skew mitigation) and SQL warehouse optimization
• Knowledge of Secure engineering practices (PHI/PII handling, encryption in transit/at rest, network isolation)

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.