Senior Director, Data Platform & AI Infrastructure

Optum; Minneapolis (MN); On-site; USD 159,000 - 273,000; Full time

Job summary

Optum, based in Eden Prairie, MN, seeks an engineering leader to drive reference architectures, platform capabilities, and observability across software, data, and AI foundations. You will lead a large, multi-team organization, roll out architecture patterns, mentor senior engineers, and ensure production-ready pilots before scaling enterprise-wide.

The role emphasizes hands-on pilots, cross-functional collaboration, and delivering scalable cloud-native infrastructure that supports AI-driven

Qualifications

• - 15+ years of software/data engineering, distributed systems, platform engineering, or related disciplines with growth in responsibility.
• - 10+ years building, scaling, and operating production software/data platforms.
• - 10+ years of hands-on programming in Python, Java, Go, SQL, or similar.
• - 10+ years driving technology adoption with Product/Data/Security leaders across large organizations.
• - 7+ years designing/operating modern data platforms with Spark/Flink, Kafka/Kinesis, Airflow, and cloud data platforms.
• - 7+ years in senior technology leadership roles overseeing large, multi-team orgs.
• - 5+ years building/operating cloud-native solutions (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• - 3+ years designing/scaling AI-powered systems (RAG, vector databases, embeddings).
• - Experience leading 60+ employees across teams/geographies and driving org change.
• - Proven ability to influence executives and deliver measurable business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• - Design and implement reference architectures and platform capabilities for software, data, and AI foundations across cloud production.
• - Translate AI frameworks and patterns into concrete reference architectures and operationalize them.
• - Validate major architectural decisions through hands-on pilots before scaling.
• - Lead, grow, and mentor a large org of senior engineers and tech leaders; hire and develop managers.
• - Build high-throughput, cloud-native infrastructure and data pipelines for enterprise workloads.
• - Align engineering execution with product, data, security, and infrastructure leadership.
• - Establish engineering standards for observability, scalability, and design reviews across teams.

Skills

Leadership

Cloud architecture

Strategy & planning

Engineering management

Cross-functional collaboration

Mentoring

Data platforms

AI/ML knowledge

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related

Advanced degree (preferred)

Tools

Snowflake

Databricks

BigQuery

Kafka

Kinesis

Airflow

Spark

Flink

AWS

Azure

GCP

Job description

Optum, based in Eden Prairie, MN, seeks an engineering leader to drive reference architectures, platform capabilities, and observability across software, data, and AI foundations. You will lead a large, multi-team organization, roll out architecture patterns, mentor senior engineers, and ensure production-ready pilots before scaling enterprise-wide.

The role emphasizes hands-on pilots, cross-functional collaboration, and delivering scalable cloud-native infrastructure that supports AI-driven