Director Software Engineering

Requisition Number: 2373373
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:

• As an AI-First Technical Leader
  • Define and drive the organization's AI-first engineering vision, embedding Generative AI, Agentic AI, and intelligent automation into engineering practices, products, and business processes
  • Lead the design and implementation of scalable AI-powered solutions leveraging Azure AI Foundry, GPT models, Agentic AI frameworks, RAG architectures, vector databases, knowledge graphs, and enterprise data platforms
  • Establish engineering standards for AI application development, including model evaluation, prompt engineering, observability, guardrails, governance, responsible AI, and security
  • Architect and deliver secure, resilient, cloud-native solutions on Azure using IaaS, PaaS, containerized, serverless, and AI-native architectures
  • Stay at the forefront of advancements in Generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs), multimodal AI, Agentic AI, MLOps, Data Engineering, and Cloud technologies, translating innovations into business value
  • Ensure system architectures support scalability, data quality, explainability, compliance, and responsible use of AI while aligning with long-term technology strategy
• As an AI-First People Leader
  • Build and nurture high-performing engineering teams capable of designing, developing, and operating AI-powered products and platforms
  • Mentor engineers, architects, and leaders in AI engineering practices, cloud architectures, data platforms, and modern software engineering
  • Foster a culture of continuous learning, experimentation, innovation, and AI adoption across the engineering organization
  • Enable teams to leverage AI as a productivity multiplier by integrating AI-powered workflows into software development, testing, operations, and analytics
  • Develop future AI leadership talent and partner with management to build organizational capabilities in AI, Data, and Cloud technologies
  • Lead organizational change management initiatives that accelerate AI adoption while ensuring employee engagement and skill development
• As an AI-First Strategic Leader
  • Partner closely with Product, Data Science, Clinical, Business, and Engineering leaders to define and execute an enterprise AI strategy aligned with business objectives
  • Drive the identification, prioritization, and delivery of AI use cases that unlock measurable business value, customer outcomes, operational efficiencies, and innovation
  • Influence technology roadmaps across multiple organizations, ensuring alignment with AI-first architecture principles and enterprise modernization strategies
  • Establish governance, compliance, risk management, and responsible AI frameworks for enterprise AI adoption
  • Build strategic partnerships with Microsoft, OpenAI, and other technology providers to accelerate innovation and enterprise AI capabilities
  • Contribute to the organization's intellectual property through AI-driven innovations, patents, reusable frameworks, accelerators, and differentiated solutions
  • Define and track AI adoption, productivity, quality, and business outcome metrics to demonstrate measurable impact from AI investments
• 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:

• Education
  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related field
• Professional experience
  • 15+ years of software engineering experience with 5+ years leading engineering organizations
  • Proven experience driving large-scale digital transformation initiatives
  • Demonstrated success leading AI-first engineering, data, or platform organizations
  • Experience building and scaling enterprise AI and cloud-native solutions
• AI & Data expertise
  • Hands-on experience implementing enterprise AI solutions
  • Solid experience building AI-powered products, copilots, intelligent workflows, and agent-based systems
  • Deep expertise in data engineering, analytics, ETL/ELT pipelines, Databricks, Spark, and modern data platforms
• Proven technical skills
  • AI Engineering & Generative AI
    • Designing and deploying production-grade AI applications
    • LLM orchestration and prompt engineering
    • RAG and Agentic AI architectures
    • AI model evaluation, testing, monitoring, and governance
    • Responsible AI, security, privacy, and regulatory compliance
    • AI observability and operational excellence
• Cloud & Platform Engineering
  • Deep expertise in Microsoft Azure ecosystem
• Data & Analytics
  • Data platforms and lakehouse architecture
  • Databricks and Spark engineering
  • Real-time and batch data processing
  • Data governance and quality frameworks
  • Advanced analytics and decision intelligence
• DevOps, MLOps & LLMOps
  • CI/CD for AI and data platforms
  • Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Jenkins
  • Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and ARM/Bicep
  • Containerization using Docker and Kubernetes
  • MLOps and LLMOps frameworks for model lifecycle management

Preferred Qualification:

• Proven technical skills
  
  • Cloud & Platform Engineering
    • Experience with AWS and GCP AI services

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.