Remote Principal Data Engineer for AI-Driven Finance Analytics

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

Job summary

Optum is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design, build, and manage foundational data architectures powering enterprise finance analytics, automation, and modern AI solutions. You will partner with finance stakeholders, AI engineers, and governance teams to deliver trusted, scalable data products that drive measurable business value.

You’ll enjoy the flexibility to telecommute from anywhere within the U.S. as you tackle challenging data integration and governance initiatives leveraging cloud

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, data platform architecture, or related technical roles.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with SQL, API integrations, ETL/ELT development, and batch or streaming data architectures.
• 3+ years of experience building and optimizing large-scale data pipelines on cloud-based data platforms (e.g., Azure, AWS, GCP, or Snowflake).
• 3+ years of experience with data modeling, metadata management, data lineage, and enterprise data governance practices.
• 2+ years of experience implementing enterprise data security, privacy, and access control standards.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy data pipelines, semantic layers, retrieval indexes, and reusable data products to address complex enterprise finance challenges with an emphasis on responsible AI use
• Partner with AI Engineers on RAG architectures, embeddings, vector databases, grounding strategies, and data refresh processes
• Identify and evaluate data sources, systems of record, reference data, documents, and operational data required to support finance solutions while assessing data quality, completeness, lineage, sensitivity, and accessibility
• Collaborate with security, privacy, compliance, and data governance teams to ensure appropriate data handling, access controls, and compliance
• Develop synthetic, masked, or de-identified datasets for development, testing, and experimentation environments
• Implement data quality monitoring, validation controls, lineage documentation, and automated exception-handling processes
• Support experimentation, control-group testing, and value measurement through reliable baseline and treatment datasets
• Evaluate emerging data and AI trends to inform solution architecture, design, and strategic innovation
• Use enterprise-approved AI tools to streamline workflows, automate data operations, and drive continuous improvement

Skills

7+ years data eng

SQL & ETL/ELT

Cloud data platforms

Data modeling & governance

Data security & privacy

Education

Bachelor’s degree or 4+ years equivalent

Tools

Collibra

Monte Carlo

Alation

Great Expectations

Job description

Optum is seeking a Lead Data Engineer to design, build, and manage foundational data architectures powering enterprise finance analytics, automation, and modern AI solutions. You will partner with finance stakeholders, AI engineers, and governance teams to deliver trusted, scalable data products that drive measurable business value.

You’ll enjoy the flexibility to telecommute from anywhere within the U.S. as you tackle challenging data integration and governance initiatives leveraging cloud