Remote Principal SRE — AI-Driven Reliability Leader

Optum; Eden Prairie (MN); Remote; USD 135,000 - 231,000; Full time

Job summary

UnitedHealth Group invites applications for a Principal Site Reliability Engineer role with remote work across the U.S. You will shape reliability platforms using AI-enhanced operations, guiding engineers, and defining observability standards across Azure and AWS. Flexibility to work remotely is offered, with in-office presence four days per week required for Minneapolis or Washington, D.C.

area hires. You will mentor teams and drive cross-functional improvements in incident detection,

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, platform engineering, DevOps, or SRE roles.
• 3+ years in a principal, staff, lead, or senior technical leadership role.
• 5+ years of experience with cloud platforms and container orchestration, preferably Azure or AWS.
• 3+ years of experience with observability tools such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or similar platforms.
• 1+ years of experience designing production automation, tooling, or AI-assisted workflows for incident response or operational decision-making.

Responsibilities

• Build AI-assisted SRE capabilities that accelerate incident detection, triage, mitigation, and recovery.
• Connect observability, deployment, runbook, ownership, and incident data into actionable operational context.
• Design human-in-the-loop workflows for safe mitigation, approvals, recovery verification, and auditability.
• Standardize OpenTelemetry, SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, and reliability scorecards across critical services.
• Improve alert quality by reducing noise, clarifying customer impact, and identifying likely causes faster.
• Lead resiliency testing, DR exercises, chaos engineering, and automated recovery validation.
• Mentor engineers and lead cross-functional reliability improvements across Optum Financial.

Skills

Leadership experience

Mentoring

Cross-functional collaboration

Incident response

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science / related field

Tools

OpenTelemetry

Prometheus

Grafana

Datadog

Azure

AWS

Terraform

Pulumi

Ansible

Kubernetes

Helm

Job description

UnitedHealth Group invites applications for a Principal Site Reliability Engineer role with remote work across the U.S. You will shape reliability platforms using AI-enhanced operations, guiding engineers, and defining observability standards across Azure and AWS. Flexibility to work remotely is offered, with in-office presence four days per week required for Minneapolis or Washington, D.C.

area hires. You will mentor teams and drive cross-functional improvements in incident detection,