Lead Data Engineer, Hybrid Cloud Data Platforms

Optum; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Professional development

Inclusive team culture

Private health insurance

Wellness programs

Pension contribution matching

Lunch provided by the company

Training opportunities

Employee donations matching

Job summary

Optum is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead the design, build, and evolution of data solutions for U.S. healthcare, driving scalable data platforms and analytics.

The role involves hands-on leadership, collaboration with product, AI, architecture, and security teams, and shaping data strategy in a hybrid Ireland-based setting. You will mentor engineers, establish data modeling, data quality, lineage, observability, and security standards, and craft reusable patterns to improve delivery

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Demonstrated experience providing technical leadership for complex data products or platforms while remaining hands-on in design and delivery.
• Proven extensive experience designing and building scalable data platforms, Lakehouse or data warehouse solutions, and high-volume batch or streaming data pipelines within public cloud environments.
• Demonstrated advanced proficiency in SQL and a general-purpose programming language such as Python, Java, or Scala.
• Demonstrated solid understanding of data modeling, distributed data processing, metadata management, data quality, lineage, and observability.
• Proven experience designing trusted data and semantic layers for analytics, data science, or AI use cases.
• Proven experience making and communicating architectural decisions across security, reliability, performance, scalability, cost, and maintainability considerations.
• Demonstrated solid understanding of software engineering practices, including automated testing, version control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, and operational support.
• Demonstrated understanding of cloud security, identity and access management, tenant isolation, and privacy principles for sensitive data.
• Proven experience partnering with product, business, architecture, AI, security, and governance stakeholders to translate ambiguous requirements into deliverable technical strategies.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers, influence technical direction, and communicate complex concepts clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the hands-on data engineering lead for strategic initiatives, setting technical direction while designing and delivering critical platform capabilities
• Lead the transition from separate data tenancies to a reusable multitenant architecture, with clear patterns for tenant isolation, access control, and data privacy
• Design and build scalable, reliable data products and platform components using modern cloud, Lakehouse, and software engineering practices
• Partner closely with product, business, AI, architecture, security, governance, and engineering stakeholders to translate complex needs into pragmatic technical roadmaps and solutions
• Establish and champion standards for data modeling, data quality, lineage, observability, testing, security, and operational readiness
• Create reference implementations and reusable engineering patterns that improve delivery consistency and reduce duplication
• Provide technical mentorship, design guidance, and constructive review to engineers, raising capability across the team without direct people‑management responsibility
• Evaluate architectural tradeoffs and emerging technologies, balancing scalability, reliability, security, cost, and speed of delivery

Skills

Technical leadership

Hands-on design

SQL proficiency

Python/Java/Scala

Data modeling

Cloud data platforms

Stakeholder collaboration

Mentoring engineers

Security and governance

Architectural direction

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

Azure data services

Databricks

Apache Spark

Snowflake

dbt

Terraform

Job description

Optum is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead the design, build, and evolution of data solutions for U.S. healthcare, driving scalable data platforms and analytics.

The role involves hands-on leadership, collaboration with product, AI, architecture, and security teams, and shaping data strategy in a hybrid Ireland-based setting. You will mentor engineers, establish data modeling, data quality, lineage, observability, and security standards, and craft reusable patterns to improve delivery