Vice President, Software Engineering

Requisition Number: 2353843
Optum Tech is a global leader in health care innovation. Our teams develop cutting-edge solutions that help people live healthier lives and help make the health system work better for everyone. From advanced data analytics and AI to cybersecurity, we use innovative approaches to solve some of health care's most complex challenges. Your contributions here have the potential to change lives. Ready to build the next breakthrough? Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.
In this critical engineering leadership role, you will be accountable for leading a global team of engineers who are accountable for the technology ecosystem running our UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement business.
Primary Responsibilities:
Engineering & AI First Modernization Leadership

• Define and execute a multi year AI first modernization strategy aligned to the company's priorities, growth goals, and operating model
• Lead the transformation of legacy platforms and applications toward AI enabled, cloud native, API driven architectures that improve speed, resilience, and cost efficiency
• Manage multimillion dollar portfolios and deliver measurable cost savings. Own engineering investment portfolios and budgets, with accountability for ROI, sequencing trade offs, and value realization across modernization and AI initiatives
• Champion an AI first engineering culture, where automation, intelligent workflows, code assist, and platform intelligence are embedded into how teams design, build, test, and operate software
• Build, lead, and scale a high performing global engineering organization with a solid culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and inclusion, enabled by AI driven productivity and insights
• Recruit, develop, and mentor senior engineering leaders capable of driving platform modernization and AI led delivery at scale

Platform & Application Modernization (AI Enabled by Design)

• Oversee the modernization of consumer and enterprise platforms supporting millions of users, ensuring scalability, security, maintainability, and intelligent observability
• Drive platform consolidation, rationalization, and reuse through shared services, common frameworks, reference architectures, and AI powered platform capabilities
• Leverage AI to reduce technical debt, accelerate legacy remediation, improve testing and quality, and enhance developer experience
• Ensure product performance, reliability, and uptime meet or exceed expectations for mission critical, public facing systems, using AI assisted monitoring, incident response, and resilience patterns
• Influence and help establish enterprise engineering, AI, and platform standards to ensure reuse, interoperability, and regulatory consistency across domains

AI, Data & Intelligent Automation

• Establish AI as a foundational capability across the engineering ecosystem, from product features to internal platforms and operations
• Lead integration of GenAI, ML, and advanced analytics into products and platforms to enable personalization, automation, insight generation, and decision support
• Partner with Product, Data, and Analytics teams to ensure platforms enable AI driven, data informed user and operational experiences that deliver measurable value
• Ensure responsible AI adoption, including governance, data ethics, explainability, model risk management, and compliance with healthcare regulations

Healthcare Compliance, Security & Responsible AI

• Ensure platforms and applications are built and operated in compliance with HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2, and other applicable standards
• Embed security, privacy, and responsible AI principles into architecture, tooling, and delivery practices ("secure and compliant by design")
• Proactively identify and mitigate risks related to data integrity, patient safety, AI model behavior, operational resilience, and information security

Operational Excellence, AI Productivity & Cost Optimization

• Own execution across complex portfolios, including modernization roadmaps, budgets, sequencing, and capacity planning, with AI informing prioritization and trade offs
• Drive cost optimization across cloud, tooling, and vendor ecosystems through architecture simplification, platform reuse, and AI enabled efficiency
• Establish and track engineering health, modernization, and AI enablement KPIs, including developer productivity, time to value, platform reuse, and run cost reduction
• Advance best in class practices across Agile delivery, DevOps, SRE, and AIOps, embedding automation and intelligence throughout the SDLC and AI-SDLC

Cross Functional & Executive Partnership

• Partner closely with Product, Clinical, Security, UX, and Executive leaders to ensure AI first modernization delivers clear business, operational, and patient outcomes
• Serve as a strategic advisor and advocate for AI driven engineering transformation in enterprise planning, investment decisions, and change initiatives

You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.
Required Qualifications:

• 15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles
• Proven track record modernizing large scale legacy platforms and establishing AI enabled, cloud native architectures
• Experience delivering and operating enterprise and consumer grade systems at scale, supporting millions of users
• Demonstrated success leading matrixed, globally distributed engineering teams
• Deep expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), microservices, APIs, DevOps, application security, and modern SDLC and AI-SDLC practices
• Hands on leadership integrating AI/ML and GenAI capabilities into production platforms and developer workflows
• Exceptional communication, influence, and executive stakeholder management skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Product oriented engineering leader with solid focus on platform reuse, developer experience, and AI enabled productivity
• Experience leading AI first transformation initiatives, including cloud migration, platform consolidation, and intelligent automation
• Proven experience deploying GenAI at scale across both customer facing and internal engineering use cases
• Experience in healthcare, digital health, financial services, or similarly regulated industries
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field

Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to local labor markets, education, work experience, certifications, etc. In addition to your salary, we offer benefits such as, a comprehensive benefits package, incentive and recognition programs, equity stock purchase and 401k contribution (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). No matter where or when you begin a career with us, you'll find a far-reaching choice of benefits and incentives. The salary for this role will range from $200,400 to $343,500 annually based on full-time employment. We comply with all minimum wage laws as applicable.
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.
UnitedHealth Group is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer under applicable law and qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, national origin, religion, age, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations.
UnitedHealth Group is a drug - free workplace. Candidates are required to pass a drug test before beginning employment.