Principal Data Engineer, Healthcare Data Platforms & AI

UnitedHealth Group; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Optum is seeking a Principal Data Engineer in Ireland to lead design and delivery of data solutions across healthcare-focused products. You will collaborate with product, AI, and security teams to build scalable data platforms, mentor engineers, and set technical direction in a hybrid work model with Dublin or Letterkenny offices.

You will drive architecture decisions, champion data quality and governance, and enable advanced analytics and AI capabilities on enterprise data while balancing cost

Qualifications

• Proven hands-on experience with Azure data services and Databricks.
• Experience with Snowflake, dbt, Terraform, or equivalent.
• Designing multitenant data platforms with tenant isolation patterns.
• Experience enabling Generative AI or conversational analytics on enterprise data.
• Knowledge of data cataloging, governance, and security controls for sensitive data.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the hands-on data engineering lead for strategic initiatives, setting technical direction and delivering platform capabilities.
• Design and build scalable data products using modern cloud and Lakehouse patterns.
• Collaborate with product, business, AI, architecture, security, governance, and engineering stakeholders to map needs to solutions.
• Establish standards for data modeling, quality, lineage, observability, testing, and security.
• Create reference implementations and reusable patterns to improve delivery consistency.
• Provide technical mentorship and design guidance without direct people management.
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs and emerging technologies balancing scale, reliability, security, cost, and speed.

Skills

Technical leadership

Mentorship

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Azure data services

Databricks

Apache Spark

Snowflake

dbt

Terraform

Multitenant data platforms

Generative AI capabilities

Data cataloging & governance

Job description

Optum is seeking a Principal Data Engineer in Ireland to lead design and delivery of data solutions across healthcare-focused products. You will collaborate with product, AI, and security teams to build scalable data platforms, mentor engineers, and set technical direction in a hybrid work model with Dublin or Letterkenny offices.

You will drive architecture decisions, champion data quality and governance, and enable advanced analytics and AI capabilities on enterprise data while balancing cost