Principal Architect

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.

We are seeking a highly skilled and visionary Principal Application Architect to lead the design, development, and optimization of modern, cloud‑native application platforms. This role is pivotal in driving innovation, enabling resilient and scalable application ecosystems, and embedding intelligence, automation, and best‑practice architectural patterns across the organization.

The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in modern distributed application architecture, including event‑driven systems, microservices, container orchestration, and cloud‑native design principles. They will bring a platform‑first, automation‑first mentality-ensuring that scalability, reliability, resilience, and AI‑first developer and operator experiences are foundational components of all application solutions.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Strategic Application Architecture Design
  • Develop and maintain end‑to‑end architecture patterns for cloud‑native applications that align with enterprise goals and best practices in distributed systems, microservices, and event‑driven design
  • Champion observability‑driven architecture (golden signals, SLOs, and error budgets) to ensure systems are designed for measurable reliability and rapid, data‑driven iteration
• Compliance, Security & Governance
  • Ensure modern applications adhere to strict security standards and integrate cloud‑native identity, access, and data‑protection principles
  • Implement policy‑as‑code and guardrails‑by‑default (e.g., service policies, RBAC, OPA) to operationalize governance across environments
• Platform Reliability & Optimization
  • Drive optimization of application platforms for high availability, performance, scalability, cost efficiency, and operational excellence across multi‑cloud or hybrid environments
  • Establish end‑to‑end observability (OpenTelemetry‑aligned tracing, metrics, logs, and profiling) with actionable dashboards, SLO reporting, and automated alerting to accelerate MTTR and improve customer experience
  • Embed resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, bulkheads, partitioning, autoscaling) and validate them continuously via chaos experiments and game days
• Technology Thought Leadership
  • Stay ahead of trends in microservices, event‑driven architecture, serverless computing, container orchestration, observability practices, chaos engineering, and AI‑enhanced developer platforms (DevEx) to continuously evolve platform capabilities
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration
  • Partner with engineering, SRE/DevOps, data, product, and security teams to design and deliver robust and scalable application solutions; evangelize best practices in resilience testing, observability, and automation
• Resilience, Disaster Recovery & Fault Tolerance
  • Provide architecture patterns for applications and platforms with built‑in resilience-circuit breakers, retries, partitioning, autoscaling, and chaos‑engineering‑ready foundations
  • Define RTO/RPO objectives, implement multi‑zone/region failover patterns, and regularly test disaster recovery through automated drills
• Automation, Scalability & CI/CD Enablement
  • Leverage automation tools and IaC practices to streamline deployments, improve operational efficiency, and support frictionless scaling of microservices and event-based workflows
• Vendor & Platform Partner Engagement
  • Collaborate with cloud vendors and platform partners to enable successful delivery of modern application solutions
• Mentorship & Engineering Enablement
  • Provide guidance and mentorship to developers and architects, fostering a culture of modern engineering excellence
• 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:

• 10+ years of experience in enterprise application architecture or engineering
• 5+ years significant focus on cloud‑native and distributed systems.
  Expertise designing and implementing solutions using cloud services (GCP, Azure, or AWS), including managed compute, orchestration, messaging, and API platforms
• Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform) and GitOps workflows
• Solid experience with microservices, containers, and orchestration technologies (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Hands‑on experience establishing end‑to‑end observability (metrics/traces/logs), defining SLOs & error budgets, and building actionable dashboards/alerts
• Practical experience with chaos engineering and resilience validation (e.g., failure injection, fault isolation, game days) and codifying DR tests.
• Experience implementing automation and AIOps for incident reduction, anomaly detection, and auto‑remediation; familiarity with integrating AI‑assisted DevEx into SDLC workflows
• 
  Preferred Qualifications:
• Architecture certifications from major cloud providers (GCP, AWS, Azure)
• Experience applying responsible and ethical design considerations in distributed application systems, especially where data and automation intersect
• Experience with large‑scale, high‑throughput application environments
• Familiarity with cloud‑native AI/automation tools to enhance application intelligence and developer productivity
• Understanding of industry‑specific compliance and interoperability standards (HL7, FHIR, HIPAA) when relevant
• Proven ability to design and integrate event‑driven and streaming pipelines using cloud‑native messaging, data, and event processing services
• Proven solid analytical, problem‑solving, decision‑making, and communication abilities

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.