Software 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 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.

This Software Engineer role will help design, build, test, deploy, and support secure, reliable software capabilities that enable the search experiences for the enterprise and its GenAI transformation.

This role is suited for an engineer with 3+ years of experience who can independently deliver well-defined features, contribute to team engineering practices, and grow into deeper ownership of cloud, data, and AI-enabled search components.

The engineer will work as part of an Agile product engineering team, partnering with senior engineers, product owners, data scientists, and platform teams to modernize search capabilities. The role will contribute to building scalable services, data pipelines, retrieval workflows, and operational tooling that improve the quality, relevance, reliability, and trustworthiness of search experiences.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Software Engineering & Application Development
  • Design, develop, test, and maintain software features, APIs, scripts, and backend components
  • Build and support capabilities that contribute to GenAI-powered search, including data preparation, retrieval workflows, ranking support, evaluation tooling, and service integrations
  • Write clean, maintainable, reusable, and well-tested code using team-approved engineering standards
  • Reuse existing code, libraries, frameworks, and patterns where appropriate to reduce duplication and improve consistency
  • Participate in code reviews and incorporate feedback from senior engineers and peers
• GenAI Search Transformation
  • Contribute to the modernization of search capabilities using GenAI-enabled patterns such as semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, query understanding, summarization support, and relevance improvement
  • Support data workflows that prepare, structure, enrich, and validate content for search and retrieval use cases
  • Assist with experimentation and evaluation of search quality, including relevance, completeness, latency, reliability, and user experience signals
  • Partner with senior engineers, product managers, and data science teams to translate search transformation goals into well-defined technical tasks
  • Build awareness of responsible AI expectations, including transparency, reliability, fairness, privacy, and secure handling of data
  • Build and maintain data ingestion, transformation, validation, and storage workflows using Python and Databricks
  • Leverage MongoDB to store, retrieve, query, and manage structured and semi-structured data used by search and GenAI capabilities
  • Implement data quality checks, logging, error handling, and repeatable pipeline patterns
  • Support the creation and maintenance of datasets used for search indexing, retrieval, evaluation, and analytics
  • Collaborate with data scientists, analysts, and senior engineers to ensure reliable data availability for AI-enabled search experiences
• Security, Compliance & Reliability
  • Follow enterprise security, privacy, and compliance standards when developing software and handling data
  • Apply approved patterns for authentication, authorization, IAM, secrets management, encryption, and secure configuration
  • Consider security, performance, scalability, reliability, and manageability in contributed code
  • Instrument delivered features using team-standard logging, monitoring, alerting, and diagnostic frameworks
  • Support production issue investigation, root-cause analysis, and defect resolution under guidance from senior engineers
• Agile Delivery & Collaboration
  • Participate actively in Agile ceremonies including backlog refinement, sprint planning, standups, demos, and retrospectives
  • Break down assigned work into clear tasks, estimate effort, raise risks early, and deliver commitments with quality
  • Collaborate with product managers, senior engineers, data science, QA, DevOps, and business stakeholders
  • Communicate technical progress, blockers, tradeoffs, and risks clearly to the team
• 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, Data Science, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 3+ years of software engineering experience building and supporting production-quality applications, services, APIs, data workflows, or cloud-based solutions
• Hands-on programming experience with Python
• Experience building backend services, scripts, APIs, automation, or data-processing components
• Experience or exposure to Databricks for data processing, transformation, analytics, or pipeline development.
• Working knowledge of MongoDB
• Familiarity with Terraform or Infrastructure as Code concepts
• Familiarity with CI/CD, Git-based workflows, automated testing, code review, and Agile software delivery

Preferred Qualifications:

• Exposure to Azure and AWS cloud services and cloud-native engineering practices
• Experience contributing to search, semantic search, retrieval, recommendation, personalization, or knowledge discovery capabilities
• Experience preparing, transforming, or validating data for search indexing, retrieval, analytics, or AI/ML use cases
• Experience building or supporting healthcare, insurance, pharmacy, claims, clinical, or consumer-facing digital products
• Experience with observability practices, including logging, dashboards, alerts, and operational runbooks
• Exposure to GenAI-enabled application patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, prompt-based workflows, query understanding, or AI-assisted search
• Understanding of data governance, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI principles
• Ability to work effectively in a matrixed, cross-functional enterprise environment

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.