Senior Data Engineer

UnitedHealth Group•Eden Prairie, MN

17d•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 diversity and inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health equity on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together. You will enjoy the flexibility to telecommute from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges. You’ll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear directions on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

Requirements

7+ years of experience in the following:
Modern data engineering stacks
Apache Spark, Databricks, Snowflake
Data ingestion frameworks and large-scale ETL/ELT pipelines
Cloud platforms
Hands-on experience with AWS, Azure, or GCP
Data modeling and storage
Dimensional modeling, normalized and denormalized schemas
Data lakes, lake house architecture, and data warehouses
Data quality and governance
Data quality frameworks, anomaly detection, data validation
Data lineage, metadata management, and cataloging tools
Kafka, Kinesis, Event Hubs, or similar technologies
Workflow orchestration
Airflow, Databricks Workflows, Prefect, or similar tools
Programming
Python and/or Scala
Advanced SQL for analytics and transformations
DevOps and platform engineering
CI/CD for data pipelines
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM)
Containerization (Docker, Kubernetes – preferred)
Leading high-performing data engineering teams
3+ years of experience in a technical leadership or people management role

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree
Experience in streaming and real-time data
Ability to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions
Experience driving architectural decisions and influencing senior leadership
Excellent written and verbal communication skills
Strong stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration skills

Responsibilities

Lead and scale data engineering teams
Manage, mentor, and grow a team of data engineers across multiple experience levels
Set technical direction, establish best practices, and conduct design and code reviews
Partner with product, analytics, data science, and platform teams to deliver business outcomes
Architect and deliver enterprise-scale data platforms
Design, build, and evolve scalable data architectures using Spark, Databricks, and Snowflake
Own end-to-end data pipelines for batch and streaming ingestion
Ensure high availability, performance, and cost efficiency of data platforms
Develop and oversee robust data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration pipelines
Implement and enforce data quality, validation, normalization, and reconciliation frameworks
Establish and maintain data lineage, metadata management, and observability
Build and manage feature stores and curated data layers for analytics and ML use cases
Partner with data science teams to productionize ML data pipelines
Support self-service analytics and data democratization initiatives
Implement data governance standards including access control, encryption, and auditability
Ensure compliance with enterprise and regulatory requirements (e.g., HIPAA)
Define SLAs, SLOs, and operational monitoring for data systems
Drive roadmap planning, capacity planning, and prioritization for data engineering initiatives
Evaluate and onboard new tools and technologies
Influence data strategy and platform modernization efforts at the enterprise level