VP of Engineering - Optum Insight Payer Market

Requisition Number: 2375523
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.
As VP of Engineering for the Optum Insight Payer Market, you will serve as the senior-most technology leader for one of Optum Insight's largest businesses - spanning payment integrity, risk and quality, claims administration and payer operations technology serving the nation's leading health plans, including UnitedHealthcare and external payer clients. Reporting to the CIO for Optum Insight Payer Market, you will own technology vision, strategy, architecture and engineering execution for a global, matrixed organization of several hundred engineers and a substantial technology P&L.
You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges.
For all hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area, you will be required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week.
Primary Responsibilities:
Technology Vision, Strategy & Architecture

• Drive technology vision and strategy behind consistent delivery and execution; translate business strategy into a multi-year technology roadmap with clear right-to-win logic, sequencing and ROI validation
• Lead the architecture practice across cloud, security, data and platform architecture, ensuring alignment to PADU, platform-thinking, data federation and interoperability standards (FHIR, X12, EDI)
• Rationalize and consolidate the platform landscape: converge overlapping agentic and automation platforms onto one to two strategic AI chassis, eliminate duplicate builds, and make decisive build-vs.-buy calls at the foundry/platform layer
• Enable both efficient federated delivery and creation of reusable accelerators, with a single source of truth for portfolio and intake to prevent parallel, redundant investment

AI/ML & Agentic Transformation

• Partner closely with product and business stakeholders to identify use cases, derive CBAs, and manage program status and value reporting against committed financial baselines
• Lead both centralized and federated delivery of AI use cases, focused on business value extraction - spanning claims, payment integrity, risk and quality, and payer operations
• Define and institutionalize an AI-native SDLC: methodology selection, team composition, role evolution, productivity KPIs and tooling-by-role; scale forward-deployed engineering and digital workforce capability across the portfolio
• Operationalize AI capabilities with focus on reliability, evaluation, problem detection and mitigation; establish model observability and human-in-the-loop standards appropriate for regulated healthcare workflows
• Establish AI cost governance: consumption budgeting, audit trails, usage attribution, and power-user enablement across model and platform vendors

Security

• Champion security initiatives in close partnership with BISO, ESRO and EIS teams, including agentic-AI governance, PHI/PII protection and HIPAA/HITRUST compliance
• Drive PLM and vulnerability management; own technology SLOs with a regular security posture cadence and clear risk-acceptance criteria
• Ensure engineering focus on secure, repeatable execution through consistent standards and best practices

Engineering Excellence & Talent

• Set development standards, hygiene and AI-supported execution; evangelize modern development, testing and DevSecOps practices
• Raise the operations bar: automation-first observability with statistical anomaly detection, elimination of manual batch monitoring, and daily cost-out discipline; favor eliminating broken processes over automating them
• Lead organizational transformation with focus on solid engineering standards and talent; drive continuous talent transformation through learning, assessments and role redesign for the AI era
• Rationalize the open-requisition portfolio against realistic capacity; partner with specialized talent acquisition on senior AI/ML hiring; build a credible succession bench of strategic engineering leaders

Cloud Engineering

• Lead the cloud engineering practice (COE); develop standards and accelerators with infrastructure as code
• Develop migration strategy and manage execution of complex cloud migrations, mainframe modernization and other infrastructure services
• Apply FinOps discipline: unit-cost economics, capacity governance and continuous cost-out across cloud and AI consumption

Vendor & Technology Partnerships

• Directly own strategic relationships with hyperscalers and frontier AI vendors; establish a clear, unblocked engagement model between engineering teams and vendor field organizations
• Negotiate and govern major SOWs, commitments and exclusivity terms in partnership with sourcing and finance; maintain architectural optionality and avoid single-vendor lock-in
• Identify and bring to the table new vendor and technology innovators; work with ES&P on bake-offs and structured proof-of-concept evaluations with clear decision criteria and timelines

M&A & Technology Innovation

• Perform technical due diligence on prospective M&A; define technical synergies and work with finance on the business case
• Lead security assessments and post-acquisition compliance (Security Shield)

Executive Partnership & P&L Impact

• Act as an executive partner to senior leaders across Optum, UHG, Technology and Operations; represent technology in enterprise AI governance and board-level reviews
• Own the technology budget and capital intake with ROI validation at the Optum Insight and enterprise levels; contribute to commercialization and deployment-model decisions (multi-tenant SaaS vs. dedicated/greenfield) for externalized platforms
• Support growth: client-facing technical leadership in payer sales pursuits, solution architecture for multi-payer deployments, and compression of client onboarding timelines

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 technology experience, with 5+ years in senior engineering/technology leadership roles (VP/CTO scope) in healthcare or technology organizations
• Proven track record building and scaling large transaction-processing platforms (claims, payments, or comparable high-volume regulated workloads)
• Experience deploying AI/ML in production environments, including generative and agentic AI, with measurable business outcomes
• Demonstrated expertise in cloud platforms (GCP, Azure, AWS), microservices architecture, DevSecOps, and application security
• Experience leading matrixed, geographically dispersed engineering organizations (several hundred engineers) across multiple time zones
• Experience owning technology budgets/P&L and negotiating strategic vendor agreements at $10M+ scale
• Proven track record as an innovative thought leader and business partner to executives across multiple business units; excellent communication, influence and stakeholder-management skills

Preferred Qualifications:

• Healthcare domain expertise: claims adjudication, payment integrity, risk adjustment, prior authorization; CMS regulatory landscape, HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2
• Experience building at-scale GenAI solutions in production, including AI-SDLC transformation, agent platforms and evaluation frameworks
• Experience standing up AI/cloud FinOps - consumption governance, audit trails and unit economics
• M&A technical due diligence and post-merger integration experience
• Mainframe modernization and large-scale legacy migration experience
• Direct partnership experience with frontier-model vendors and hyperscaler co-engineering programs
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field

*All employees working remotely will be required to adhere to UnitedHealth Group's Telecommuter Policy.
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.