Senior Director Software Engineering

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:

• Technology and Architecture Leadership 
  • Define and drive the engineering vision, architecture roadmap, and long term technology strategy for complex, enterprise-scale platforms 
  • Promote modernization initiatives such as cloud-native design, microservices, automation, DevSecOps, DevOps and platform engineering 
  • Ensure robust engineering governance, architectural consistency, and adherence to security and compliance standards 
• Engineering Excellence and Delivery 
  • Lead multiple cross-functional scrum teams and large engineering organizations (100+ engineers directly/indirectly) 
  • Oversee end-to-end delivery - from concept to release - ensuring quality, performance, scalability, and cost optimization 
  • Establish engineering best practices, coding standards, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and SRE practices 
  • Drive predictability in execution through robust planning, sprint discipline, and measurement (OKRs/MBOs, KPIs) 
• People Leadership and Organizational Development 
  • Build, inspire, and mentor high-performing engineering teams across global locations 
  • Partner with HR and talent teams to attract top engineering talent and develop solid leadership pipelines 
  • Foster a culture of innovation, accountability, psychological safety, and continuous improvement 
• Stakeholder Management and Strategic Alignment 
  • Collaborate with senior executives, product leaders, and business partners to align engineering priorities with business outcomes 
  • Represent engineering in strategic forums, steering committees, and planning cycles 
  • Influence cross functional teams and drive decision-making in a matrixed enterprise environment 
• Operational Excellence and Risk Management 
  • Ensure platform reliability, availability, observability, and operational resilience 
  • Manage engineering budgets, vendor relationships, capacity planning, and resource optimization 
  • Proactively address technical debt, engineering risks, architectural bottlenecks, and compliance/security gaps 
  • Ensure adoption of AI tools in SDLC - Github Copilot, Cursor, Codeium, or Amazon Q Developer 
• AI First Strategy and Innovation 
  • Define and evangelize an AI First engineering strategy, ensuring AI/ML capabilities, intelligent automation, Agentic AI and generative AI are integrated into product roadmaps, platform design, and organizational processes 
  • Identify opportunities to modernize legacy workflows using AI agents, LLMs, predictive analytics, and autonomous systems 
  • Partner with enterprise AI, data science, and architecture teams to deploy scalable AI platforms, ensuring security, governance, ethical use, and compliance 
  • Drive innovation programs, proofs of concept, and rapid experimentation to accelerate AI adoption across engineering functions
• 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:

• Undergraduate degree or equivalent experience
• 20+ years of experience in software engineering with progressively senior leadership roles 
• 5+ years of leading large engineering organizations across multiple geographies 
• Deep expertise in modern software architectures: Java/Spring, microservices, cloud (Azure/AWS), distributed systems, APIs, containers (Docker/Kubernetes), streaming platforms 
• Solid understanding of engineering processes, DevOps, CI/CD, GitHub/Automation pipelines, SRE frameworks

Preferred Qualifications:

• Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or Business 
• Experience in healthcare, claims, clinical systems, or large regulated environments 
• Demonstrated success modernizing legacy platforms and driving cloud migrations at scale 
• Solid executive presence and ability to influence at VP/SVP/CXO level 

Leadership Competencies:

• Strategic thinking and ability to blend technical depth with business acumen 
• Excellent communication, negotiation, and executive storytelling skills 
• Proven experience transforming engineering culture and driving enterprise-wide change 
• High emotional intelligence, coaching mindset, and ability to lead through ambiguity

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.