Principal Data Engineer - Hybrid Cloud Data Platform Lead

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

Benefits offered by this job

Private health insurance

Wellness programs

Matching pension

Lunch provided by the company

Training opportunities

Donations matching

Job summary

Optum Ireland is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead design and delivery of scalable data platforms and products. You will work at the intersection of engineering, analytics, and business strategy to enable advanced analytics and AI capabilities.

The role requires hands-on leadership, deep cloud data experience, and the ability to mentor engineers while shaping technical direction for privacy, security, and reliability across complex data systems.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in a relevant field or equivalent professional experience.
• Demonstrated experience providing technical leadership for complex data products or platforms.
• Proven extensive experience designing and building scalable data platforms, Lakehouse or data warehouse solutions.
• Advanced proficiency in SQL and a general‑purpose language (Python, Java, or Scala).
• Strong understanding of data modeling, distributed data processing, metadata management, data quality, lineage, observability.
• Experience designing trusted data and semantic layers for analytics, data science, or AI use cases.

Responsibilities

• Lead the hands-on data engineering efforts for strategic initiatives, setting technical direction.
• Design and implement multitenant architecture with tenant isolation and data privacy patterns.
• Build scalable data products and platform components using modern cloud and Lakehouse practices.
• Collaborate with product, business, AI, architecture, security, governance, and engineering teams to translate needs into roadmaps.
• Define standards for data modeling, quality, lineage, observability, testing, security, and operational readiness.

Skills

Data engineering leadership

SQL proficiency

Programming languages

Cloud data platforms

Architectural decisions

Mentoring engineers

CI/CD & IaC

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Azure data services

Databricks

Apache Spark

Snowflake

dbt

Terraform

Job description

Optum Ireland is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to lead design and delivery of scalable data platforms and products. You will work at the intersection of engineering, analytics, and business strategy to enable advanced analytics and AI capabilities.

The role requires hands-on leadership, deep cloud data experience, and the ability to mentor engineers while shaping technical direction for privacy, security, and reliability across complex data systems.