Director Software Engineering

Requisition Number: 2372788
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.
Software engineering is the application of engineering to the design, development, implementation, testing and maintenance of software in a systematic method. The roles in this function will cover all primary development activity across all technology functions that ensure we deliver code with high quality for our applications, products and services and to understand customer needs and to develop product roadmaps.
These roles include, but are not limited to analysis, design, coding, engineering, testing, debugging, standards, methods, tools analysis, documentation, research and development, maintenance, new development, operations and delivery. With every role in the company, each position has a requirement for building quality into every output. This also includes evaluating new tools, new techniques, strategies; Automation of common tasks; build of common utilities to drive organizational efficiency with a passion around technology and solutions and influence of thought and leadership on future capabilities and opportunities to apply technology in new and innovative ways.
Primary Responsibilities:

• Provides leadership to and is accountable for the performance and direction through multiple layers of management and senior level professional staff.
• Work most often impacts a large business unit, or multiple markets/sites
• Lead design and execution of AI-first architecture supporting transactional data strategy and real-time operational use cases
• Drive modernization of mainframe-integrated APIs toward cloud-native, event-driven platforms
• Own end-to-end API platform strategy and governance, including scalability, resiliency, and adoption
• Establish and operationalize event-driven, API-first, and agent-ready interfaces (MCP, RAG, AI-enabled services)
• Partner with architecture, product, AI governance, and platform teams to align execution with enterprise priorities
• Drive engineering best practices across DevSecOps, CI/CD, observability, and platform reliability
• Provide leadership for multi-team delivery (direct + matrix ~30+ span) with accountability for outcomes, quality, and timelines
• 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:

• Proven experience leading enterprise platform architecture and delivery across APIs, cloud, data, and AI/ML domains
• Solid experience with cloud-native platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and distributed systems (Kubernetes, containers)
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing AI/GenAI solutions (LLMs, RAG, vector DB, MLOps/LLMOps)
• Solid experience driving end-to-end delivery ownership, including cross-team coordination and execution at scale
• Expertise in DevSecOps practices, CI/CD pipelines, and engineering standards
• Experience building and governing data platforms and pipelines with modern architectures (e.g., medallion layers, scalable ingestion/processing)
• Deep expertise in microservices, API-first, and event-driven architecture patterns
• Demonstrated ability to modernize legacy systems, including mainframe-integrated environments

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.