Data Engineering Lead

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.

Primary Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Architect, design, and implement scalable data platforms, pipelines, and ETL/ELT workflows
• Lead end to end data engineering efforts, ensuring reliability, performance, and cost efficient data systems
• Mentor and guide junior and senior data engineers, fostering a culture of technical excellence and collaboration
• Collaborate with cross functional teams (analytics, product, engineering, business) to align data solutions with business goals

Data Engineering & Pipeline Development

• Build, optimize, and maintain robust data pipelines using Python, SQL, and Apache Airflow
• Manage large-scale data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration frameworks
• Optimize database queries, stored procedures, and schema design in MSSQL and other SQL/NoSQL systems

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Develop and manage cloud native data platforms using AWS services (S3, Glue, Lambda, RDS, Redshift, EC2, Step Functions, etc.)
• Ensure high availability, disaster recovery, and monitoring of critical data workflows
• Implement CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and DevOps practices for data engineering workloads

Data Warehousing & Modeling

• Design and enhance enterprise data warehouses and data marts following industry best practices
• Drive dimensional modeling, data partitioning, performance tuning, and metadata management
• Ensure consistency and quality across analytical datasets and data sources

Data Governance & Quality

• Establish data quality frameworks, lineage tracking, validation checks, and documentation
• Implement governance standards including security, compliance, and access controls
• Partner with business stakeholders to define and enforce master data and reference data strategies
• Comply with all applicable Company policies, procedures, and business directives, changes including those relating to work location, team assignments, work schedules, and flexible work arrangements

Required Qualifications

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

8+ years of experience in Data Engineering, with 6+ years in a role

3+ years of hands-on experience with AWS Cloud for data architecture and pipeline development, especially key services like AWS Glue

Extensive experience with Airflow for workflow orchestration

Solid expertise in MSSQL - query optimization, indexing, stored procedures, performance tuning

Solid knowledge in building Machine learning models, Generative AI, Building Multi Agent System (Google ADK preferable)

Solid knowledge of data management principles: governance, quality, lineage, and security

Solid understanding of Data Warehousing, ETL/ELT (Airflow, Informatica/SSIS), and big data processing

Proficiency in Python for data engineering (Pandas, PySpark, etc.)

Proven excellent leadership, communication, and cross team collaboration skills

Proven ability to translate business needs into scalable technical designs

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.