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 looking for a Senior Data Engineer to design, implement, and operate large-scale data systems and production-grade applications in a cloud environment. The role focuses on building highly reliable, scalable, and secure data pipelines, services, and platforms, with solid ownership across the full software development lifecycle, from design and development to deployment and production support.

The ideal candidate has deep hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed systems, workflow orchestration, and modern data warehouses, and is comfortable developing and maintaining critical backend services that run in production. This role requires close collaboration with engineering and product teams to deliver robust, well-engineered solutions that meet performance, reliability, and security standards.

Primary Responsibilities

• Data & Platform Engineering:
• Design, build, and maintain scalable, fault-tolerant data pipelines and data platforms in a cloud-native environment
• Own end-to-end development of data ingestion, processing, and transformation systems used by downstream services and applications
• Implement efficient data models and storage patterns in modern data warehouses and operational databases
• Production Systems & Applications:
• Develop and maintain production-grade backend services and applications that power data workflows and internal platforms
• Build and expose data services and APIs to enable secure, reliable access to data across engineering systems
• Ensure high availability, low latency, and resilience of data-driven applications running in production
• Workflow Orchestration & Reliability:
• Design and operate workflow orchestration frameworks to schedule, monitor, and manage complex data workloads
• Implement robust error handling, retries, monitoring, and alerting for all production pipelines and services
• Troubleshoot and resolve performance, scalability, and reliability issues in live systems
• Cloud & DevOps Engineering:
• Deploy and operate data systems using cloud infrastructure, containers, and automated CI/CD pipelines
• Apply Infrastructure-as-Code and automation best practices to ensure repeatable, reliable deployments
• Optimize cloud resources for performance, cost, and operational efficiency
• Engineering Excellence & Collaboration:
• Participate in system design reviews and contribute to architecture decisions for data and platform components
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-tested code following engineering best practices
• Mentor junior engineers and raise the overall engineering maturity of 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 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

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field
• Hands-on experience building and maintaining production data pipelines
• Experience working with large datasets in a cloud environment
• Cloud Platforms: Experience with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Programming: Knowledge of Python, SQL
• Data Engineering: Knowledge of ETL/ELT concepts, data pipeline design
• Databases: Knowledge of relational databases and data warehouses
• Workflow Orchestration: Knowledge of Airflow or similar tools
• DevOps: Knowledge of Docker, Git, CI/CD fundamentals
• Solid understanding of data modeling and performance optimization
  
  

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with distributed data processing frameworks (e.g., Spark)
• Experience in enterprise or data-intensive environments
• Exposure to backend frameworks or API development
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code and automated deployments
  
  

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.