Principal 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.

GQL Platform uses GQL APIs that enable access to standardized healthcare data from across the enterprise. GQL minimizes fetching, while allowing access to data in several domains and source systems from single endpoint - often from a single call.

The Graph Query Language (GQL) Platform uses GQL APIs that enable access to vast amounts of streaming health care data from across the enterprise. GQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language designed to make APIs fast, flexible, and stable.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design reusable architecture and solutions within guidelines, ensuring quality
• Evaluate reuse opportunities, confirm solutions address business problems, and align with organizational initiatives
• Solve complex business and technical problems and code daily
• Mentor team members and junior engineers through sessions, reviews, and tech talks, influencing roadmaps and strategy
• Conduct code reviews, ensuring best practices and providing actionable feedback
• Drive best practices and design patterns into scalable, reusable solutions
• Implement automation practices, ensure pipeline efficiency, and enhance existing processes
• Own outage documentation, prioritize actions, manage observability tools, and maintain the backlog
• Develop threat prevention mechanisms, enforce security best practices, and ensure remediation
• Attract and recruit talent, train junior interviewers, and conduct final candidate reviews
• Write clear stories with measurable criteria, decompose tasks, drive strategic themes, and track productivity
• Solve customer problems, improve metrics, and present innovative technology solutions
• Offer production support for a large-scale platform serving a critical customer base during on-call rotation weeks and assist or lead during P1/P2 war rooms, as necessary
• 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:

• Bachelor’s in computer science (related field) or equivalent work experience
• 10+ years as a software professional with solid computer science fundamentals including but not limited to data structure, algorithms, networking, parallel and distributed computing
• 10+ years of software development experience
• 3+ years of development experience and expertise with AWS / AZURE / GCP using cloud native technologies (Not only infra) and Kubernetes (or any container orchestrator)
• Experience in one of the following languages: Java/JavaScript/Rust
• Experience in full lifecycle of software development projects in an agile environment along with building web applications, GraphQL and RESTful web services
• Experience in Databases, SQL programming, No SQL DBs like Azure CosmosDB, ElasticSearch
• Extensive experience implementing super graph architecture with Apollo GraphQL APIs and Apollo Router using an open-source model
• Complete understanding of core software engineering principles, including OOP, microservices, data management, usability, debugging, and configuration management
• Willing to tackle challenging initiatives that may require learning new technologies
• Demonstrating proactive engagement with the platform and prioritizing customer success above all other considerations
• Demonstrating excellent problem-solving skills and attention to detail
• Demonstrating solid leadership and communication skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Advance degree in Computer Science (related field)
• Experience in Health Care Industry
• Experience in managing a small team of engineers
• Experience with proactive application monitoring and trouble resolution
• Proven experience in managing and supporting a large-scale platform that caters to a significant and critical customer base, handling billions of customer interactions
• Expertise in Stake holder management
• Knowledge of security best practices in cloud 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.