Principal Site Reliability Engineer

UnitedHealth Group • Plymouth, MN

81d • $132,200 - $226,600 • Remote

About The Position

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 Principal Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to lead the design and implementation of resilient, observable, and high-performing systems across our organization. This role is ideal for a strategic thinker and hands-on technologist who thrives in complex environments and is passionate about reliability, automation, and innovation-especially at the intersection of SRE and AI. You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related field
• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles, with at least 3 years in a principal or lead capacity
• 5+ years of experience with CI/CD tooling (e.g., Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD)
• 5+ years of experience with container orchestration in cloud platforms (Azure or OCI preferred)
• 3+ years of deep experience in observability and monitoring tools (e.g., OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog)
• 3+ years of experience with chaos engineering, DR planning, and performance testing

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Pulumi) and automation tools such as Ansible, Helm
• Experience with service mesh technologies (e.g., Istio, Linkerd)
• Familiarity with AI/ML concepts and experience applying them in operational contexts
• Proven excellent communication and leadership skills

Responsibilities

• Lead the implementation and standardization of OpenTelemetry across services to enhance observability and traceability
• Define and enforce SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets in collaboration with engineering teams
• Design and execute resiliency tests, disaster recovery (DR) exercises, and chaos engineering game days to proactively identify and mitigate system weaknesses
• Develop automated failure injection and recovery validation tools
• Enhance CI/CD pipelines with automated performance and load testing to ensure reliability and scalability before production deployment
• Collaborate with DevOps and QA to integrate performance benchmarks into release gates
• Drive cloud adoption strategies with a focus on resiliency patterns, multi-region failover, and cost-effective scaling
• Partner with cloud architects to design fault-tolerant infrastructure and services
• Explore and implement AI-driven solutions for anomaly detection, incident prediction, and intelligent alerting
• Innovate with AI agents to automate routine SRE tasks and improve incident response efficiency
• Serve as a thought leader and mentor for SRE best practices across the organization
• Lead cross-functional initiatives to improve system reliability, developer productivity, and customer experience

Benefits

• Paid Time Off which you start to accrue with your first pay period plus 8 Paid Holidays
• Medical Plan options along with participation in a Health Spending Account or a Health Saving account
• Dental, Vision, Life & AD&D Insurance along with Short-term disability and Long-Term Disability coverage
• 401(k) Savings Plan, Employee Stock Purchase Plan
• Education Reimbursement
• Employee Discounts
• Employee Assistance Program
• Employee Referral Bonus Program
• Voluntary Benefits (pet insurance, legal insurance, LTC Insurance, etc.)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Director
• Industry: Insurance Carriers and Related Activities
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree