VP of Engineering – Optum Insight Payer Market

UnitedHealth Group•Eden Prairie, MN

5d•$200,400 - $343,500•Hybrid

About The Position

As VP of Engineering for the Optum Insight Payer Market, you will serve as the senior-most technology leader for one of Optum Insight's largest businesses — spanning payment integrity, risk and quality, claims administration and payer operations technology serving the nation's leading health plans, including UnitedHealthcare and external payer clients. Reporting to the CIO for Optum Insight Payer Market, you will own technology vision, strategy, architecture and engineering execution for a global, matrixed organization of several hundred engineers and a substantial technology P&L. 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.

Requirements

15+ years of technology experience, with 5+ years in senior engineering/technology leadership roles (VP/CTO scope) in healthcare or technology organizations
Proven track record building and scaling large transaction-processing platforms (claims, payments, or comparable high-volume regulated workloads)
Experience deploying AI/ML in production environments, including generative and agentic AI, with measurable business outcomes
Demonstrated expertise in cloud platforms (GCP, Azure, AWS), microservices architecture, DevSecOps, and application security
Experience leading matrixed, geographically dispersed engineering organizations (several hundred engineers) across multiple time zones
Experience owning technology budgets/P&L and negotiating strategic vendor agreements at $10M+ scale
Proven track record as an innovative thought leader and business partner to executives across multiple business units; excellent communication, influence and stakeholder-management skills

Nice To Haves

Healthcare domain expertise: claims adjudication, payment integrity, risk adjustment, prior authorization; CMS regulatory landscape, HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2
Experience building at-scale GenAI solutions in production, including AI-SDLC transformation, agent platforms and evaluation frameworks
Experience standing up AI/cloud FinOps — consumption governance, audit trails and unit economics
M&A technical due diligence and post-merger integration experience
Mainframe modernization and large-scale legacy migration experience
Direct partnership experience with frontier-model vendors and hyperscaler co-engineering programs
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field

Responsibilities

Drive technology vision and strategy behind consistent delivery and execution; translate business strategy into a multi-year technology roadmap with clear right-to-win logic, sequencing and ROI validation
Lead the architecture practice across cloud, security, data and platform architecture, ensuring alignment to PADU, platform-thinking, data federation and interoperability standards (FHIR, X12, EDI)
Rationalize and consolidate the platform landscape: converge overlapping agentic and automation platforms onto one to two strategic AI chassis, eliminate duplicate builds, and make decisive build-vs.-buy calls at the foundry/platform layer
Enable both efficient federated delivery and creation of reusable accelerators, with a single source of truth for portfolio and intake to prevent parallel, redundant investment
Partner closely with product and business stakeholders to identify use cases, derive CBAs, and manage program status and value reporting against committed financial baselines
Lead both centralized and federated delivery of AI use cases, focused on business value extraction — spanning claims, payment integrity, risk and quality, and payer operations
Define and institutionalize an AI-native SDLC: methodology selection, team composition, role evolution, productivity KPIs and tooling-by-role; scale forward-deployed engineering and digital workforce capability across the portfolio
Operationalize AI capabilities with focus on reliability, evaluation, problem detection and mitigation; establish model observability and human-in-the-loop standards appropriate for regulated healthcare workflows
Establish AI cost governance: consumption budgeting, audit trails, usage attribution, and power-user enablement across model and platform vendors
Champion security initiatives in close partnership with BISO, ESRO and EIS teams, including agentic-AI governance, PHI/PII protection and HIPAA/HITRUST compliance
Drive PLM and vulnerability management; own technology SLOs with a regular security posture cadence and clear risk-acceptance criteria
Ensure engineering focus on secure, repeatable execution through consistent standards and best practices
Set development standards, hygiene and AI-supported execution; evangelize modern development, testing and DevSecOps practices
Raise the operations bar: automation-first observability with statistical anomaly detection, elimination of manual batch monitoring, and daily cost-out discipline; favor eliminating broken processes over automating them
Lead organizational transformation with focus on solid engineering standards and talent; drive continuous talent transformation through learning, assessments and role redesign for the AI era
Rationalize the open-requisition portfolio against realistic capacity; partner with specialized talent acquisition on senior AI/ML hiring; build a credible succession bench of strategic engineering leaders
Lead the cloud engineering practice (COE); develop standards and accelerators with infrastructure as code
Develop migration strategy and manage execution of complex cloud migrations, mainframe modernization and other infrastructure services
Apply FinOps discipline: unit-cost economics, capacity governance and continuous cost-out across cloud and AI consumption
Directly own strategic relationships with hyperscalers and frontier AI vendors; establish a clear, unblocked engagement model between engineering teams and vendor field organizations
Negotiate and govern major SOWs, commitments and exclusivity terms in partnership with sourcing and finance; maintain architectural optionality and avoid single-vendor lock-in
Identify and bring to the table new vendor and technology innovators; work with ES&P on bake-offs and structured proof-of-concept evaluations with clear decision criteria and timelines
Perform technical due diligence on prospective M&A; define technical synergies and work with finance on the business case
Lead security assessments and post-acquisition compliance (Security Shield)
Act as an executive partner to senior leaders across Optum, UHG, Technology and Operations; represent technology in enterprise AI governance and board-level reviews
Own the technology budget and capital intake with ROI validation at the Optum Insight and enterprise levels; contribute to commercialization and deployment-model decisions (multi-tenant SaaS vs. dedicated/greenfield) for externalized platforms
Support growth: client-facing technical leadership in payer sales pursuits, solution architecture for multi-payer deployments, and compression of client onboarding timelines