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 Senior Software Engineer role will design, build, test, deploy, and support backend services, APIs, data integrations, and automated quality engineering capabilities that enable unified search experiences across the enterprise.

This role is suited for an engineer with 5+ years of experience who can independently own backend features and service integrations, contribute to system design and technical decisions, and improve quality through solid automated testing practices. The engineer will work as part of an Agile product engineering team focused on modernizing enterprise search capabilities and reliable test automation.

The role will partner with product owners, senior engineers, data science, platform, and quality engineering teams to deliver scalable, secure, well-tested search capabilities that improve relevance, reliability, performance, and trust across enterprise search experiences.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, test, deploy, and support backend services, APIs, and integration components for unified enterprise search capabilities
• Build scalable and maintainable APIs that support search, retrieval, ranking, filtering, personalization, and GenAI-enabled workflows
• Develop backend services using Python (and Java), applying clean code, modular design, secure coding, and reusable engineering patterns
• Integrate backend services with MongoDB to store, retrieve, query, and manage structured and semi-structured data used by search and retrieval capabilities
• Contribute to API design decisions, including request/response contracts, error handling, resiliency, observability, versioning, and performance considerations
• Participate actively in code reviews and help improve code quality, maintainability, and test coverage across the team
• Contribute to the development of unified search capabilities across enterprise products, platforms, and data sources
• Support GenAI-enabled search patterns such as semantic search, retrieval-augmented generation, query understanding, summarization support, and relevance improvement
• Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and senior engineers to translate search transformation goals into scalable backend capabilities
• Contribute to experimentation and measurement of search quality, including relevance, completeness, latency, reliability, and user experience signals
• Develop data validation, error handling, logging, and monitoring patterns for MongoDB integrations
• Troubleshoot data access, query performance, and integration issues across backend services
• Partner with data and platform teams to ensure data availability, consistency, quality, and secure access for enterprise search use cases
• QE Automation & Test Coverage
  • Build and maintain automated test frameworks and test suites using Python, Java, and Selenium
  • Develop automated tests for APIs, backend services, UI-integrated search flows, data validation, and regression coverage
  • Increase test coverage across critical search capabilities to improve release quality and reduce production defects
  • Create reusable automation patterns that support functional testing, integration testing, regression testing, smoke testing, and quality gates
  • Partner with quality engineering, product, and development teams to define test scenarios, acceptance criteria, and measurable quality outcomes
  • Integrate automated tests into CI/CD pipelines to support faster, safer, and more reliable delivery
  • Analyze failed tests, defects, logs, and metrics to identify root causes and improve product quality
  • Security, Reliability & Operational Excellence
    Follow enterprise security, privacy, and compliance standards when developing backend services, APIs, data integrations, and automated tests
  • Support production issue investigation, root-cause analysis, defect resolution, and continuous improvement
  • Consider performance, scalability, resiliency, manageability, and cost when designing and implementing backend capabilities
  • Identify technical debt, quality gaps, and automation opportunities, and contribute to plans that improve engineering outcomes
• Agile Delivery & Collaboration
  • Participate actively in Agile ceremonies including backlog refinement, sprint planning, standups, demos, and retrospectives
  • Break down features into technical tasks, estimate work, identify dependencies, and deliver commitments with quality
  • Collaborate with product managers, senior engineers, data scientists, quality engineers, DevOps, platform teams, and business stakeholders
  • Communicate technical decisions, implementation tradeoffs, risks, blockers, and quality concerns clearly
  • Mentor junior engineers through code reviews, automation patterns, testing practices, and backend development guidance
  • Demonstrate ownership of assigned capabilities from design through development, testing, deployment, and production support
• 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, Information Technology, Data Science, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• 5+ years of software engineering experience building and supporting production-quality backend applications, APIs, services, integrations, or test automation capabilities
• Hands-on backend development experience with Python
• Experience with Java for backend development, test automation, service integration, or enterprise application development
• Experience designing, developing, and supporting REST APIs or service-based integrations
• Experience building automated tests using Python, Java, Selenium, or similar automation frameworks
• Experience with API testing, integration testing, regression testing, and CI/CD-based quality gates
• Ability to troubleshoot backend, API, data, and test automation issues using logs, metrics, traces, test results, and structured problem-solving

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience contributing to enterprise search, semantic search, retrieval, recommendation, personalization, knowledge discovery, or content discovery capabilities
• Experience validating search quality through relevance testing, regression testing, data validation, or automated evaluation workflows
• Experience with performance testing, load testing, or API reliability testing
• Experience integrating automated test suites into CI/CD pipelines
• Experience building reusable test automation frameworks or improving test coverage across product teams
• Experience supporting healthcare, insurance, pharmacy, claims, clinical, or consumer-facing digital products
• Experience working in a matrixed, cross-functional enterprise environment
• 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, responsible AI, and enterprise security expectations
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.