Job Information
UnitedHealth Group Director Data Engineering in Bengaluru, India
Requisition number: 2349096
Job category: Technology
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.
Optum Global Advantage is part of a global health care technology and business solutions ecosystem focused on enabling better experiences, solider operational outcomes, and innovation at scale. Through our delivery network, Optum has access to scalable, high-quality talent and infrastructure across geographies, enabling modern platform engineering, cloud transformation, and enterprise data innovation.
What makes us stand apart
Impact on millions of people through constant innovation
Ability to produce your life's best work through passion, engineering excellence, and relentless commitment
A culture focused on creating better outcomes and healthier lives for those we serve
A Better Way to Care | A Better Way to Think | A Better Way to Succeed
Positions in this function design, engineer, modernize, and operate enterprise data platforms, data products, AI solutions, and reusable frameworks-including AI Builder and Agentic AI capabilities-that power analytics, intelligent automation, interoperability, and operational decisioning. They support short and long term business priorities by building secure, observable, scalable, and cost efficient data and AI ecosystems; developing platform and AI accelerators; and enabling trusted data and intelligence across ingestion, transformation, model development, agent orchestration, consumption, and governance layers.
Primary Responsibilities:
Leadership and Management
Build, lead, and retain high-performing, diverse data engineering teams focused on enterprise-scale, mission-critical data platforms and products
Create a culture of technical excellence, accountability, ownership, experimentation, and continuous learning
Invest in the career development of engineers and technical leads through mentoring, coaching, and structured growth plans
Lead with a customer-first mindset, ensuring platform reliability, scalability, security, and performance for internal and external stakeholders
Define and govern enterprise scale architecture for data, AI, and Agentic AI solutions, enabling intelligent, autonomous, and secure decisioning across platforms and business workflows
Platform Reimagination and Data Product Strategy
Lead the reimagination of legacy and on-prem data ecosystems into cloud-native, AI-enabled, framework-driven platforms
Define and evolve modern architecture patterns including Medallion Architecture, Lakehouse Architecture, and Data Mesh / Data Fabric and Agentic AI reference patterns for autonomous and intelligent workflows
Drive a data-and-AI-as-a-product strategy with clear ownership, SLAs, discoverability, reusable APIs, and well-defined data contracts
Establish enterprise reference architectures, standards, blueprints, and platform guardrails for data and Agentic AI across Azure, AWS, and GCP
Data Frameworks, Orchestration, CI/CD, Security and Observability
Design and implement reusable Data Acquisition (DA) and Data Ingestion (DI) frameworks for batch, streaming, CDC, API-based, and database-driven ingestion and AI/GenAI-ready data pipelines
Build Kafka-driven acquisition patterns using event-driven architectures, pub/sub models, schema registry, exactly-once semantics, and idempotent processing
Create metadata-driven and configuration-based frameworks to accelerate onboarding, reduce development effort, and standardize engineering practices
Implement enterprise orchestration using Apache Airflow, Azure Data Factory, and GCP Composer for DAG-based, event-driven, and hybrid batch/streaming workflows
Establish end-to-end CI/CD, DevOps, DataOps, and DevSecOps practices, extending to MLOps and GenAI pipeline with automated testing, environment promotion, deployment automation, rollback, and monitoring
Build enterprise data and AI security frameworks covering RBAC/ABAC, encryption, masking, tokenization, row- and column-level security, and secure data sharing
Enable end-to-end data observability and lineage across data and AI pipelines from-source, ingestion, transformation, and consumption with quality checks, freshness checks, SLA monitoring, alerting, anomaly detection, and root cause analysis
Platform Infrastructure, Reliability and Performance Engineering
Provide deep technical direction across multi-cloud platform infrastructure spanning Azure, AWS, GCP, Databricks, Snowflake, Spark, Hadoop, and distributed data systems, supporting data and AI driven workloads at scale
Design and implement High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) strategies for Databricks and Snowflake, including replication, failover, and business continuity patterns
Drive performance tuning across Snowflake and Databricks, including warehouse sizing and right-sizing, dynamic clustering, clustering keys, query tuning, concurrency scaling, partitioning, caching, join optimization, and job parallelism
Optimize end-to-end workload performance, latency, throughput, resiliency, and cost-efficiency for both real-time and batch data platforms
AI-Driven Engineering, Migration and Collaboration
Embed AI across the SDLC to accelerate engineering delivery through code generation, test automation, documentation support, migration accelerators, and engineering productivity tools
Lead large-scale on-prem to cloud migration programs using rehost, replatform, and refactor strategies while ensuring minimal downtime, data integrity, and performance optimization
Enable AI/ML-ready data platforms that support feature engineering, real-time pipelines, model data preparation, and modern MLOps patterns
Partner with Product, Architecture, Cybersecurity, Platform, Analytics, and AI/ML teams to define strategy, prioritize execution, and communicate complex technical decisions to senior leadership
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
We, at Core Data and Data Platforms (CDDs), are constantly growing and innovating to build solider enterprise data engineering capabilities and deploy them to solve complex healthcare and business problems. With the right mindset, platforms, and tools, we forge meaningful partnerships across the enterprise and help data work better for everyone.
- Being a specialized platform engineering team, we are always on the lookout for talent that can share our goals and deliver together
Data Engineering Function
Define and evolve the enterprise data engineering strategy and roadmap, aligning platform capabilities with business priorities, AI adoption, and long term modernization goals
Positions in this function build innovative and scalable solutions using structured and unstructured data across cloud-native and hybrid ecosystems
Apply knowledge of distributed computing, data modeling, data warehousing, streaming, observability, governance, security, and advanced performance optimization to deliver enterprise-grade platforms
Use technologies such as SQL, Python, PySpark, Scala, Databricks, Snowflake, Hadoop, Kafka, and cloud-native services to engineer reliable data products and platform services
Work closely with Product, Architecture, Security, DevOps, Analytics, and AI/ML teams to align technical strategy to business outcomes
Enable AI, GenAI, and advanced analytics use cases by ensuring data platforms are trusted, governed, scalable, and optimized for feature engineering, real time processing, and model consumption
Role - Director Data Engineering
Lead the design, development, modernization, and operations of enterprise data platforms aligned to data products, analytics, AI, and interoperability capabilities
Own platform cost governance and optimization, balancing performance, scalability, and reliability with financial stewardship across cloud and data platforms
Manage strategic vendor and partner relationships, driving platform leverage, innovation, and delivery outcomes across cloud and data ecosystem providers
Define and track engineering and platform success metrics, including reliability, adoption, performance, cost efficiency, and business impact
Ensure platform compliance with enterprise security, privacy, regulatory, and data governance standards, embedding guardrails into engineering and AI workflows
Build reusable platform services, modules, APIs, and framework accelerators for ingestion, acquisition, transformation, orchestration, security, lineage, observability, and performance engineering
Create technology roadmaps focused on reusability, scalability, resilience, performance, security, cloud-native engineering, and AI-first delivery
Collaborate with enterprise architects and platform leaders to evolve architecture standards, best practices, and engineering governance
Present platform vision, modernization strategy, and technical trade-offs to senior leadership, delivery teams, and business stakeholdersImplement CI/CD, DevOps, DataOps, MLOps, and reliability practices to deliver production-grade platform capabilities at scaleDrive backlog prioritization, technical feasibility assessments, and framework adoption to accelerate development and migration timelines across teamsBring hands-on depth in Databricks, Snowflake, Azure, AWS, GCP, Spark, Kafka, data warehousing, and distributed systems, while leading engineers through architectural deep dives and code reviews
Required Qualifications:
Bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field
15+ years of progressive experience in data engineering, platform engineering, cloud modernization, and enterprise technology delivery including exposure to AI-enabled platform
15+ years of combined experience in building software, platforms, and enterprise data engineering solutions, including significant experience in leadership roles
Hands on experience developing and scaling enterprise data and AI ready platforms, reusable frameworks, and data products in complex, regulated business environments
Experience integrating AI, GenAI and Agentic AI into software engineering and migration workflows to improve speed, quality, and consistency
Demonstrated experience leading global teams and driving large-scale transformation across data platforms and cloud ecosystems and AI ready architecture
Proven expertise in platform modernization, on-prem to cloud migration, multi-cloud architecture, and large-scale distributed systems and AI-enabled platform transformation
Proven solid command of performance engineering, data warehousing, real-time and batch processing, lineage, observability, governance and operational readiness for AI and GenAI workloads
Proven excellent analytical, problem-solving, stakeholder management, and executive communication skills
Preferred Qualifications:
Relevant certifications in Azure, AWS, GCP, Databricks, and Snowflake and AI /data platform certifications
Experience in healthcare or other regulated industries
In addition to this, we highly value these traits!
Being Accountable
Believing in taking initiative and calculated risks
Spending time to understand goals, priorities, and plans
Committed to delivering results
Dedicated to serving customers
Innovative and creative, with a logical and methodical approach to problem solving
Ability to relay technical and analytical insight to internal and external stakeholders through solid technical and functional depth
Technical Skills
Core Data Platforms
Databricks, Delta Lake, Snowflake, Snowpark, Medallion Architecture, Lakehouse Architecture, Data Mesh / Data Fabric, Databricks HADR, Snowflake HADR, dynamic clustering, warehouse and query tuning
Cloud and Big Data
Azure (ADF, ADLS, Synapse, Azure Databricks), AWS (S3, EMR, Glue, Lambda, Redshift), GCP (BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub, Composer), Spark, Hadoop ecosystem, distributed storage and compute
Data Acquisition and Ingestion
Batch and streaming ingestion, CDC, metadata-driven ingestion, API-based ingestion, reusable connectors, schema enforcement, data contracts, data onboarding automation
Streaming and Event Patterns
Kafka, Event Hubs, Pub/Sub, event-driven architecture, pub/sub, schema registry, exactly-once processing, idempotent design, real-time acquisition patterns
Orchestration and CI/CD
Apache Airflow, Azure Data Factory, GCP Composer, DAG orchestration, automated testing, Jenkins, Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions, Git, deployment automation, environment promotion, rollback
Security and Governance
RBAC / ABAC, encryption, masking, tokenization, row- and column-level security, secure data sharing, governance controls, DevSecOps integration
Lineage and Observability
Data lineage, data quality rules, freshness checks, SLA / SLO monitoring, alerting, monitoring dashboards, anomaly detection, root cause analysis, observability platforms
Performance Engineering
Snowflake warehouse sizing, query optimization, clustering keys, concurrency scaling, Databricks / Spark optimization, partitioning, caching, joins, job tuning, cost optimization
Programming and APIs
Python, PySpark, Scala, SQL, Java, REST APIs, microservices, reusable services and platform APIs
AI and Modern Engineering
AI-first mindset, AI in SDLC, GenAI tools, development and migration accelerators, MLOps, feature store readiness, automation-led engineering
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.