Principal Site Reliability Engineer - Remote

UnitedHealth Group•Eden Prairie, MN

15h•Remote

About The Position

Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care’s most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? 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. For all hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area, you will be required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week. You’ll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

Requirements

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 AWS 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

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or related field
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

Observability & Monitoring
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
Resiliency Engineering
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
CI/CD & Performance Engineering
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
Cloud Architecture & Reliability
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
AI & Innovation in SRE
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
Leadership & Mentorship
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