Senior Software Engineering Lead - Python Fullstack, FastAPI

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:

• Define and drive architecture for enterprise-scale applications and platforms.

• Design scalable, secure, resilient cloud-native solutions.

• Lead development of APIs, backend services, and distributed systems.

• Establish engineering standards, architecture patterns, and best practices.

• Drive cloud modernization and platform engineering initiatives.

• Lead DevOps, SRE, and operational excellence efforts.

• Conduct architecture reviews, design reviews, and technical governance.

• Partner with Product, Security, Infrastructure, and Enterprise Architecture teams.

• Mentor senior engineers and technical leads.

• Drive innovation, automation, performance optimization, and engineering excellence.

Required Qualifications:

Must Have

• Graduate -  B. Tech and/or MS in computer science or equivalent

• 9 to 12+ years of software engineering experience.

• 5+ years leading large-scale technical initiatives.

• Strong hands-on Python expertise.

• Experience architecting enterprise-scale distributed systems.

• Strong cloud architecture experience (GCP/AWS/Azure).

• Kubernetes and container platform expertise.

• Experience implementing DevOps and CI/CD practices.

• Strong understanding of security, resiliency, scalability, and operational excellence.

• Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills.

Good to Have

• AI / GenAI Exposure

• Experience or familiarity with any of the following is desirable but not required:

• Large Language Models (LLMs)

• Prompt Engineering

• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

• AI-powered applications

• AI-assisted software development

Agentic AI Frameworks

• Awareness or hands-on exposure to:

• LangChain

• LangGraph

• Google ADK

• Semantic Kernel

• MCP (Model Context Protocol)

• Amazon Bedrock Agents

• CrewAI

• AutoGen

Additional Preferred Qualifications

• Healthcare or regulated industry experience.

• Enterprise platform engineering background.

• Cloud Architect Certifications.

• Kubernetes Certifications (CKA/CKAD).

• TOGAF or Architecture Certifications.

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.