Senior Data Engineer - Remote - Remote Eligible

Caring. Connecting. Growing Together.

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.

You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and operate scalable ELT/ETL pipelines (batch and streaming) with strong SLAs and observability
• Model source data into well-governed, analytics-ready layers (staging, marts) using dimensional and/or Data Vault patterns
• Lead the evolution of our lakehouse/warehouse architecture; drive partitioning, file layout, and table format best practices
• Implement data quality, testing, and lineage at scale; champion data contracts with upstream teams
• Optimize performance and cost across compute, storage, and query engines; establish capacity plans and autoscaling
• Partner with product, analytics, and ML to define semantic layers, metrics, and feature/data products
• Uphold security, privacy, and governance standards; manage access controls for PHI and sensitive data
• Mentor engineers, review designs/PRs, and contribute to standards, runbooks, and documentation
• Leverage enterprise-approved AI tools to enhance productivity and innovation by streamlining workflows and automating repetitive tasks

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.

Required Qualifications:

• 5+ years of professional data engineering experience in cloud environments (Azure or AWS)
• 5+ years expert-level SQL and strong Python (or Scala) for data processing and tooling
• 3+ years of proven experience with a major warehouse (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and a lake/lakehouse stack (e.g., Databricks, Spark, Delta/Iceberg/Hudi)
• 3+ years of experience with solid data modeling skills; comfortable designing star schemas and incremental pipelines

Preferred Qualifications:

• AWS and Azure experience
• .NET, C# experience
• GitHub Actions experience
• Previous healthcare background
• Hands-on with orchestration (Airflow, Dagster, Prefect) and modern ELT (dbt or equivalent)

*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy.

Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer benefits such as a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase, and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). The salary for this role will range from $89,900 to $160,600 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.

Application Deadline: This will be posted for a minimum of 2 business days or until a sufficient candidate pool has been collected. Job posting may come down early due to volume of applicants.