Lead Data Engineer - Finance Data & AI Pipelines

UnitedHealth Group; Eden Prairie (MN); Remote; USD 113,000 - 193,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Comprehensive benefits package

Incentive & recognition programs

Equity stock purchase & 401k

Job summary

UnitedHealth Group, Optum unit, seeks a Lead Data Engineer to design and manage foundational data architectures powering finance analytics, automation, and AI solutions. You will partner with finance stakeholders and AI teams to deliver scalable, secure data products for measurable business value.

You’ll enjoy telecommute from anywhere in the U.S. and collaborate in a diverse culture while building pipelines, semantic layers, and RAG data patterns with governance and data quality in mind.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of data engineering or data platform architecture experience.
• 5+ years with SQL, API integrations, ETL/ELT, and batch or streaming data architectures.
• 3+ years building data pipelines on cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP, Snowflake).
• 3+ years data modeling, metadata management, data lineage, and governance practices.
• 2+ years implementing data security, privacy, and access controls.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy data pipelines, semantic layers, and data products for enterprise finance.
• Collaborate with AI engineers on RAG architectures, embeddings, and data refresh processes.
• Identify data sources, systems of record, reference data, and assess quality, lineage, accessibility.
• Work with security, privacy, governance teams to ensure compliant data handling and access control.
• Develop synthetic or de-identified datasets for development and testing environments.
• Implement data quality monitoring, lineage documentation, and automated exception handling.
• Support experimentation and value measurement with reliable baseline datasets.
• Evaluate emerging data and AI trends to inform architecture and innovation.
• Use enterprise AI tools to streamline workflows and drive data operations.

Skills

7+ years data engineering / data to be

5+ years SQL

API integrations

ETL/ELT development

Batch or streaming data architectures

3+ years cloud data platforms

3+ years data modeling & governance

2+ years data security & access

Education

Bachelor's degree or 4+ years of equivalent data engineering experience

Tools

Azure

AWS

GCP

Snowflake

Job description

UnitedHealth Group, Optum unit, seeks a Lead Data Engineer to design and manage foundational data architectures powering finance analytics, automation, and AI solutions. You will partner with finance stakeholders and AI teams to deliver scalable, secure data products for measurable business value.

You’ll enjoy telecommute from anywhere in the U.S. and collaborate in a diverse culture while building pipelines, semantic layers, and RAG data patterns with governance and data quality in mind.