Senior Director Software Engineering - IAM, OAuth2.0, OIDC,

Requisition Number: 2338809
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.
Identity is the security perimeter of the modern enterprise. Every login, token, and policy decision flows through our Identity Platform, and a growing portfolio of productized identity experiences is built on top of it. When it works, no one notices. When it does not, everything stops.
This is a senior engineering leadership role on the Identity Platform team. You will own the shared substrate that our productized identity experiences are built on. You will own Authentication today and extend the platform into Authorization and non-human identity as the landscape evolves.
Primary Responsibilities:

• This is mission-critical infrastructure that is multi-region, highly available & low-latency
• Set and execute the multi-year technical strategy for the platform, including the path from AuthN today to a unified AuthN and AuthZ platform that serves both human and non-human identities
• Own architecture, reliability, security, and operations for platform services at enterprise scale
• Build the platform to perform at scale and support growth, with a solid focus on self-service adoption and easy integration for product teams that build on top
• Partner with Principal Engineering, Product Engineering, TPM, Security, and Ops to align roadmaps and drive execution
• Act as the senior engineering voice for the platform in India. Raise the technical bar, grow leaders, and build a team people want to join
• Set the standard for how AI transforms engineering work across the team, including how software is designed, written, tested, and operated
• 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 regard 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
• Hands-on expertise with modern identity protocols, including OIDC, OAuth 2.0, SAML, JWT, MFA, and session and token architectures
• Proven track record architecting and operating highly available, low-latency distributed systems that power mission-critical workloads at scale
• Solid cloud-native fundamentals, including AWS, GCP, or Azure; Kubernetes; API design; event-driven architectures; and modern observability
• Demonstrated ability to set multi-year technical strategy and drive it through multiple teams of engineers and engineering leaders
• Security-first engineering mindset. Threat modeling, hardening, and incident response are core disciplines, not afterthoughts
• Actively pushing the frontier of AI in engineering. You have moved beyond using AI tools for personal productivity and are reshaping how your teams build, review, test, and operate software, with measurable gains in velocity and quality

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with passwordless and phishing-resistant authentication, including passkeys, FIDO2, and WebAuthn
• Experience operating in regulated environments such as healthcare, financial services, or government
• Depth in modern AuthZ, including policy-as-code (OPA, Cedar) and fine-grained or relationship-based access models (ReBAC, Zanzibar-style)
• Familiarity with non-human and workload identity, including short-lived credentials, secrets management, and SPIFFE or SPIRE
• Practical understanding of agentic AI identity, including how AI agents authenticate, act on behalf of users, and are governed
• Exposure to fraud and abuse detection, bot mitigation, or risk-based authentication.

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.