Principal Software Engineer - 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.

As a Principal Software Engineer for Data, the person will lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and high-performance data pipelines across that involve healthcare clinical data, using modern big data and cloud technologies (Azure, Databricks, and Spark), ensuring alignment with UnitedHealth Group’s data governance standards. This role requires a hands-on leader who can write and review code, mentor teams, and collaborate across business and technical stakeholders to drive data strategy and innovation. The person needs to be ready to take up AI and AIOps as part of their work and support the data science teams with ideas and reviews their work.

Primary Responsibilities :

• Design and lead the implementation of robust, scalable, and secure data architectures for clinical and healthcare data for batch and real time pipelines
• Architect end-to-end data pipelines using big data and cloud-native technologies (e.g., Spark, Databricks, Azure Data Factory)
• Ensure data solutions meet performance, scalability, and compliance requirements, including HIPAA and internal governance policies
• Build and optimize data ingestion, transformation, and storage pipelines for structured and unstructured clinical data. Guide teams that are doing it and ensure support for incremental data processing
• Ensure data quality, lineage is embedded in all solutions
• Lead code reviews, proof-of-concepts, and performance tuning for large-scale data systems
• Collaborate with data governance teams to ensure adherence to UHG and healthcare data standards, lineage, certification, Data use rights, and data privacy
• Contribute to the maturity of data governance domains and participate in governance councils and working groups
• Design, Build and monitor MLOps pipelines, model inference and robust piplelines for running AI operations on data
• Secondary Responsibilities

Mentor data engineers and analysts, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous learning

Collaborate with product managers, data scientists, and business stakeholders to translate requirements into data solutions

Influence architectural decisions across teams and contribute to enterprise-wide data strategy

Stay current with emerging technologies in cloud, big data, and AI / ML, and evaluate their applicability to healthcare data

Promote the use of generative AI tools (e.g., GitHub Copilot) to enhance development productivity and innovation

Drive adoption of DevOps and DataOps practices, including CI / CD, IaC, and automated testing for data pipelines

Required Qualifications :

Preferred Qualifications :

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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.