Director Software Engineer

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.
As a Director, Software Engineering on the Engagement Technology team within Optum Technology, you will lead multiple software engineering teams delivering enterprise scale consumer engagement platforms. You will also support engineering execution, architecture, and continuous evolution for enterprise identity resolution, profile management systems, and consumer engagement platforms. In this role, you will lead the delivery of highly scalable and resilient systems capable of handling real-world consumer traffic, while orchestrating the adoption of AI/ML capabilities-such as personalization pipelines, semantic search/RAG, conversational assistants, and predictive signals-into consumer experiences. Partnering closely with Product, UX, Data Science, and Security leaders, you will establish engineering best practices, govern AI engineering standards, and build intuitive, privacy-safe engagement experiences at enterprise scale.
Primary Responsibilities
Own engineering execution for consumer engagement platforms, ensuring predictable delivery, high quality, solid operational stability, and operational readiness across enterprise-scale systems
Manage multiple software engineering teams across front-end, backend, mobile, platform, and AI/ML enablement capabilities, including managers and senior engineers, while building leadership bench strength
Develop and execute employee development and retention strategies, including career pathing, performance expectations, development plans, coaching, succession planning, and engagement practices for engineers and engineering leaders
Establish and govern engineering standards for architecture, coding, testing, observability, incident response, documentation, CI/CD, automated testing, release automation, and infrastructure as code
Drive planning and governance across roadmaps, prioritization, capacity planning, dependency management, risk mitigation, and communication of delivery tradeoffs
Deliver consumer engagement capabilities that improve acquisition, activation, retention, and loyalty, including onboarding and identity experiences, notifications and messaging orchestration, customer support self-service flows, experimentation, personalization tooling, content delivery, and engagement analytics instrumentation
Partner with Product, UX, Marketing, Customer Support, Data, Security, and Business leaders to translate customer insights into intuitive, accessible, measurable, and privacy-safe experiences
Champion privacy-safe engagement design through consent management, preference centers, compliance-aware data usage, and secure-by-design practices in partnership with Information Security
Lead adoption of AI/ML-enabled consumer experiences, including personalized recommendations, semantic search and retrieval-augmented generation, conversational assistants, intelligent routing, classification, summarization, and predictive engagement or churn signals
Establish AI engineering practices for model evaluation, safety, bias, monitoring, drift management, prompt and response governance, guardrails, red teaming, human-in-the-loop workflows, fallback strategies, and cost/performance management
Modernize and evolve platform architecture using microservices, event-driven systems, API-first design, domain-oriented design, distributed systems, and data pipelines aligned to business needs
Own production health across SLAs/SLOs, error budgets, incident response, postmortems, observability, capacity management, performance tuning, vulnerability management, and continuous improvement
Provide executive-level reporting on delivery status, operational health, engagement outcomes, AI ROI, risks, dependencies, and key technical decisions
Hire, coach, mentor, and retain diverse engineering talent while fostering a culture of accountability, learning, inclusion, career growth, and continuous improvement
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
14+ years of experience in software engineering
4+ years of experience managing software engineering teams
Hands-on experience with AI/ML integration patterns (e.g., personalization pipelines, RAG, conversational AI, model inference services) and operationalizing them safely
Experience driving engineering excellence through SDLC best practices, CI/CD, testing strategies, observability, and incident management
Demonstrated experience delivering high-availability, consumer-facing digital products at enterprise scale
Proven background in modern software architecture, cloud-native delivery, distributed microservices, APIs, and data pipelines
Preferred Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or an applicable technical area (or equivalent experience)
Experience leading AI productization efforts end-to-end, including model evaluation, monitoring, governance, and cost control
Experience with experimentation platforms (A/B testing, feature flags), personalization engines, and customer data platforms (CDPs)
Experience building consent-aware experiences in regulated environments with privacy, security, and compliance requirements
Demonstrated solid analytics mindset using engagement metrics to guide technical prioritization and continuous iteration
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.

Work arrangement
No