Principal Data 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.

Primary Responsibilities

• Delivery Leadership: Own end‑to‑end delivery of data initiatives, driving backlog prioritization, sprint planning, and execution in Agile/Scrum teams
• Design & Build Data Infrastructure: Architect, develop, and maintain scalable ETL/ELT pipelines for large‑scale data processing
• Data Architecture Leadership: Lead architectural decisions for data warehousing, lakehouse, and big‑data solutions
• Performance Optimization: Improve database performance, query efficiency, and data workflows
• Data Quality & Governance: Implement and enforce data quality, validation, monitoring, and compliance frameworks
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration: Work closely with product owners, data scientists, analysts, and business teams to deliver analytics and AI/ML solutions
• Mentorship & Best Practices: Mentor engineers, conduct design reviews, and promote data engineering standards
• Automation & Deployment: Build automated testing, CI/CD, and deployment pipelines for data systems
• Reliability & Troubleshooting: Lead resolution of complex data issues and ensure platform reliability and scalability
• 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:

• Agile Delivery: Solid hands‑on experience working in Agile/Scrum teams, including sprint planning, story estimation, and delivery tracking
• Programming & Data Platforms: Azure Databricks, Python/Scala, Azure Data Factory (ADF), Airflow, SQL; Snowflake experience is a plus
• Data Modeling & Warehousing: Expertise in relational and NoSQL databases and enterprise data modeling
• Big Data & ETL: Hands‑on with Spark, Hadoop, or similar frameworks
• Cloud Platforms: Azure experience (GCP exposure is a plus).
• Containerization & Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
• Distributed Systems: Data partitioning, parallel processing, and distributed architectures
• Data Security & Compliance: Knowledge of GDPR, HIPAA, or similar regulatory standards

Preferred Qualifications

• Streaming technologies such as Kafka
• Snowflake optimization and advanced usage
• AI and ML enablement, including RAG development and agent creation
• CI/CD tools such as Jenkins for data pipelines

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.