Principal Data Engineer

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.

Position in this function owns the technical architecture, engineering standards, and technology roadmap for a secure, scalable healthcare data platform. The role sets direction for data ingestion, lakehouse design, interoperability, governance, privacy, and analytics across AWS/Azure and Databricks.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Define target-state architecture for data ingestion, object storage, lakehouse processing, data products, analytics, and operational reporting
• Establish AWS/ Azure and Databricks reference architectures using Amazon S3, ECS/EKS, Step Functions, Lambda, EventBridge, Databricks Workflows, Unity Catalog, Auto Loader, Delta Lake, and Databricks SQL
• Design medallion/lakehouse patterns for raw, curated, and consumption layers, including tenant isolation, schema evolution, incremental processing, replay, lineage, and retention
• Define open-table-format strategy across Delta Lake and Apache Iceberg, including catalog integration, interoperability, ACID guarantees, schema/partition evolution, and multi-engine access
• Set standards for Spark/PySpark, SQL, Python, data quality, observability, metadata management, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and disaster recovery
• Define scalable ingestion patterns for APIs, relational databases, files, events, FHIR, HL7, XML, JSON/NDJSON, documents, and unstructured data
• Lead data governance and security architecture: PHI classification, HIPAA-aligned controls, de-identification, access control, audit logging, encryption, secrets, retention, and policy enforcement
• Guide healthcare semantic interoperability using FHIR R4, HL7 v2, OMOP CDM, SNOMED CT, LOINC, RxNorm, ICD-10, CPT, terminology services, and source-to-standard mappings
• Evaluate architecture decisions through technical proofs of concept, performance benchmarks, resilience tests, cost analysis, and operational-readiness reviews
• Partner with engineering, clinical informatics, security, privacy, data governance, and product teams to convert requirements into technical roadmaps and implementation standards
• Establish responsible AI-DLC practices for AI-assisted design, code generation, testing, documentation, review, and operational support
• Comply with the terms and conditions of the employment contract, company policies and procedures, and any and all directives (such as, but not limited to, transfer and/or re-assignment to different work locations, change in teams and/or work shifts, policies in regards to flexibility of work benefits and/or work environment, alternative work arrangements, and other decisions that may arise due to the changing business environment). The Company may adopt, vary or rescind these policies and directives in its absolute discretion and without any limitation (implied or otherwise) on its ability to do so

Required Qualifications:

• 11+ years of overall industry experience in software development and relevant domains
• 8+ years of data, cloud, platform, or solution architecture experience
• Deep AWS/Azure architecture experience: S3, IAM, VPC/networking, ECS/EKS, Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge, CloudWatch, KMS, Secrets Manager, and infrastructure as code
• Experience designing governed access for engines such as Databricks SQL, Amazon /Azure Athena, Snowflake, Trino, or similar
• Knowledge of healthcare data standards and privacy: FHIR, HL7, OMOP, clinical terminologies, HIPAA, PHI, de-identification, and auditability
• Solid Apache Iceberg knowledge: catalog architecture, partition evolution, schema evolution, snapshots/time travel, compaction, metadata optimization, and query-engine interoperability
• Solid Databricks expertise: Apache Spark, PySpark, SQL Warehouses, Auto Loader, Delta Lake, Lakeflow, Unity Catalog, Workflows, and cluster/workload optimization
• Expertise in distributed data architecture, streaming and batch processing, data modeling, metadata, lineage, data quality, data contracts, and SRE/operability principles
• Demonstrated clear technical leadership and communication skills, including architecture diagrams, ADRs, engineering standards, and executive decision support

Preferred Qualifications:

• AWS Solutions Architect and/or Databricks certification
• Experience with data mesh, domain-oriented data products, MLOps, clinical NLP, or LLM-enabled data workflows
• Experience in regulated validation, data provenance, or regulatory reporting

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.