Principal Data Engineer - Scalable Data Platforms (Hybrid)

UnitedHealth Group; Dublin; Hybrid; EUR 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Professional development

Inclusive team culture

Health insurance and pension benefits

Job summary

Optum Product Engineering Nexus (OPEN) in Ireland seeks a Principal Data Engineer to lead design, build and evolution of data solutions powering new healthcare products.

You will work at the intersection of engineering, analytics and business strategy, building scalable, trusted data platforms in cloud environments and enabling AI capabilities.

This hybrid role offers Dublin/Letterkenny office options with home-based work and a strong focus on data quality, security and governance.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent professional experience.
• Proven technical leadership for complex data products or platforms.
• Experience designing scalable data platforms in public cloud environments.
• Advanced SQL and at least one general-purpose language (Python/Java/Scala).
• Understanding of data modeling, metadata, lineage, and observability.
• Experience building trusted data/semantic layers for analytics or AI.
• Ability to communicate architectural decisions across teams.
• Experience with cloud security and tenant isolation.

Responsibilities

• Lead hands-on data engineering for strategic initiatives and set technical direction.
• Design multitenant architectures with tenant isolation and data privacy patterns.
• Build scalable data products using modern cloud and Lakehouse practices.
• Collaborate with product, AI, security, governance and engineering stakeholders on roadmaps.
• Establish standards for data quality, lineage, observability, and testing.
• Create reference patterns to improve delivery and reduce duplication.
• Mentor engineers and guide technical direction across the team.
• Evaluate architecture decisions balancing scalability, security, cost, and speed.

Skills

Technical leadership

Data platform design

Cloud data engineering

SQL proficiency

Programming (Python/Java/Scala)

Data modeling and governance

Mentoring engineers

Stakeholder communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in a relevant field

Tools

Azure data services

Databricks

Snowflake

dbt

Terraform

Job description

Optum Product Engineering Nexus (OPEN) in Ireland seeks a Principal Data Engineer to lead design, build and evolution of data solutions powering new healthcare products.

You will work at the intersection of engineering, analytics and business strategy, building scalable, trusted data platforms in cloud environments and enabling AI capabilities.

This hybrid role offers Dublin/Letterkenny office options with home-based work and a strong focus on data quality, security and governance.