Principal Data Engineer - Remote, AI & Cloud Leader

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

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work options

Comprehensive benefits

Job summary

UnitedHealth Group is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to design and build scalable cloud data systems in Azure, delivering ETL/ELT pipelines, Spark workloads, and AI integrations across the Optum Insight Engineering AI team. You will work with Azure Databricks, Snowflake, and large-scale data platforms to enable machine learning, insights, and automation.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with stakeholders, and help define data platform standards while aligning with security and privacy

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software or data engineering experience with data integration, modeling, architecture, and ETL/ELT.
• 5+ years of hands-on Python development.
• 4+ years of Apache Spark / PySpark and distributed data processing.
• 5+ years of advanced SQL including data modeling, complex queries, and optimization.
• 1+ years designing and integrating REST, GraphQL, or similar APIs.
• 1+ years integrating LLMs, AI agents, or generative AI into engineering workflows.
• 1+ years building data solutions on Azure Databricks, Snowflake, or similar cloud platforms.
• 1+ years using Git, CI/CD, automated testing, code quality, and infrastructure as code.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop scalable cloud data systems and reusable patterns for Azure cloud.
• Build and optimize large-scale data pipelines on Azure Databricks and Spark.
• Develop and deploy AI-enabled data products, dashboards, and BI reporting.
• Mentor data engineers and provide technical direction.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to decompose requirements and estimate effort.
• Advance data engineering standards and best practices for performance and reliability.

Skills

Python

Spark

SQL

ETL/ELT

Data Modeling

REST/GraphQL

LLMs

Azure Databricks

Tools

Azure Databricks

Snowflake

Git

CI/CD

Job description

UnitedHealth Group is seeking a Principal Data Engineer to design and build scalable cloud data systems in Azure, delivering ETL/ELT pipelines, Spark workloads, and AI integrations across the Optum Insight Engineering AI team. You will work with Azure Databricks, Snowflake, and large-scale data platforms to enable machine learning, insights, and automation.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with stakeholders, and help define data platform standards while aligning with security and privacy