Software Engineering Lead

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 a Software Engineer Lead to design, develop, deploy, and support scalable, secure, cloud-native applications and backend services.

The role combines technical leadership with end-to-end delivery across regulated business processes. The role involves building high-performance APIs, microservices, document-processing workflows, data-transformation pipelines, cloud integrations, and production-grade software for complex business processes, including healthcare and regulated-domain use cases.

Expectations:

• Acts as a Technical Lead within the team or platform
• Owns and drives complex technical initiatives with minimal oversight
• Influences architecture beyond immediate deliverables
• Proactively identifies risks, scalability concerns, and long-term design trade-offs.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Architect, design, develop, and deliver scalable, secure, and maintainable backend platforms, APIs, and microservices
• Build production-quality Python applications using frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or equivalent technologies
• Own the end-to-end software lifecycle, including design, development, testing, deployment, monitoring, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and production support
• Develop document-ingestion, PDF-processing, data-extraction, data-normalization, and business-rule-based transformation workflows
• Design and implement integrations with cloud services for compute, storage, databases, messaging, networking, security, monitoring, and analytics
• Build asynchronous, concurrent, event-driven, or streaming workflows where appropriate
• Apply engineering best practices, including automated testing, code reviews, secure coding, observability, structured logging, auditability, and effective error handling
• Collaborate with product, architecture, security, DevOps, governance, QA, and business teams to deliver compliant and maintainable solutions
• Mentor junior engineers and technical guidance through design reviews, code reviews, and knowledge sharing
• Use modern AI-assisted and agentic software-development practices to improve requirements analysis, design, coding, testing, debugging, documentation, and review
• Comply with all applicable Company policies, procedures, and business directives, changes including those relating to work location, team assignments, work schedules, and flexible work arrangements

Required Qualifications:

• B.Tech, M.Tech, or equivalent degree in Computer Science Engineering / Information Technology, or a related field
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience developing and supporting scalable backend applications, APIs, microservices, or cloud-native platforms
• Solid hands-on experience with FastAPI, Flask, or a similar backend framework
• Experience with asynchronous programming, concurrency, background processing, and event-driven application design
• Proven experience designing & developing large backend systems and RESTful APIs
• Extensive hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform, including GCP / AWS / Microsoft Azure, or an equivalent public/private/hybrid cloud environment
• Experience with PDF processing, PyMuPDF libraries, document understanding, table extraction, OCR or multimodal document workflows
• Experience working with  LLMs, Prompt engineering, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or AI-assisted process automation, will be an added advantage
• Experience deploying, operating, monitoring, and supporting production-grade applications in a cloud environment
• Proven experience with SQL and NoSQL databases, data modeling, indexing strategies, query optimization, and performance tuning
• Experience with automated testing using tools such as pytest, including unit, integration, API, or end-to-end testing
• Working knowledge of Kubernetes or an equivalent container-orchestration platform, including deployment, scaling, resiliency, health checks, and troubleshooting
• Familiarity with Google ADK/LangChain/MCP/Microsoft Semantic Kernel/Amazon Bedrock Agents, or similar frameworks, will be an added advantage
• Solid understanding of cloud architecture, networking, IAM, security, monitoring, high availability, disaster recovery, and cost optimization
• Expert-level proficiency in Python writing modular/maintainable/prod-grade code
• Proven ability to identify architectural bottlenecks, investigate complex production issues, and propose scalable and reliable solutions
• Proven solid communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and tech documentation skills
• Proven solid software engineering, backend, cloud, testing, and production-support experience are essential
• Expert Python skills, backend framework expertise, cloud deployment experience, and production-support capability

Preferred Qualification:

• Generative AI, Agentic AI, and AI-assisted coding experience

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.