Vice President, Software Engineering

Optum / UnitedHealth Group
Minnetonka, MN

About the job

In this critical engineering leadership role, you will be accountable for leading a global team of engineers who are accountable for the technology ecosystem running our UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement business.

Responsibilities

Define and execute a multi year AI first modernization strategy aligned to the company's priorities, growth goals, and operating model

Lead the transformation of legacy platforms and applications toward AI enabled, cloud native, API driven architectures that improve speed, resilience, and cost efficiency

Manage multimillion dollar portfolios and deliver measurable cost savings. Own engineering investment portfolios and budgets, with accountability for ROI, sequencing trade offs, and value realization across modernization and AI initiatives

Champion an AI first engineering culture, where automation, intelligent workflows, code assist, and platform intelligence are embedded into how teams design, build, test, and operate software

Build, lead, and scale a high performing global engineering organization with a solid culture of accountability, continuous improvement, and inclusion, enabled by AI driven productivity and insights

Recruit, develop, and mentor senior engineering leaders capable of driving platform modernization and AI led delivery at scale

Oversee the modernization of consumer and enterprise platforms supporting millions of users, ensuring scalability, security, maintainability, and intelligent observability

Drive platform consolidation, rationalization, and reuse through shared services, common frameworks, reference architectures, and AI powered platform capabilities

Leverage AI to reduce technical debt, accelerate legacy remediation, improve testing and quality, and enhance developer experience

Ensure product performance, reliability, and uptime meet or exceed expectations for mission critical, public facing systems, using AI assisted monitoring, incident response, and resilience patterns

Influence and help establish enterprise engineering, AI, and platform standards to ensure reuse, interoperability, and regulatory consistency across domains

Establish AI as a foundational capability across the engineering ecosystem, from product features to internal platforms and operations

Lead integration of GenAI, ML, and advanced analytics into products and platforms to enable personalization, automation, insight generation, and decision support

Partner with Product, Data, and Analytics teams to ensure platforms enable AI driven, data informed user and operational experiences that deliver measurable value

Ensure responsible AI adoption, including governance, data ethics, explainability, model risk management, and compliance with healthcare regulations

Ensure platforms and applications are built and operated in compliance with HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2, and other applicable standards

Embed security, privacy, and responsible AI principles into architecture, tooling, and delivery practices ("secure and compliant by design")

Proactively identify and mitigate risks related to data integrity, patient safety, AI model behavior, operational resilience, and information security

Own execution across complex portfolios, including modernization roadmaps, budgets, sequencing, and capacity planning, with AI informing prioritization and trade offs

Drive cost optimization across cloud, tooling, and vendor ecosystems through architecture simplification, platform reuse, and AI enabled efficiency

Establish and track engineering health, modernization, and AI enablement KPIs, including developer productivity, time to value, platform reuse, and run cost reduction

Advance best in class practices across Agile delivery, DevOps, SRE, and AIOps, embedding automation and intelligence throughout the SDLC and AI-SDLC

Partner closely with Product, Clinical, Security, UX, and Executive leaders to ensure AI first modernization delivers clear business, operational, and patient outcomes

Serve as a strategic advisor and advocate for AI driven engineering transformation in enterprise planning, investment decisions, and change initiatives

Qualifications

Minimum

15+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years in senior engineering leadership roles

Proven track record modernizing large scale legacy platforms and establishing AI enabled, cloud native architectures

Experience delivering and operating enterprise and consumer grade systems at scale, supporting millions of users

Demonstrated success leading matrixed, globally distributed engineering teams

Deep expertise in cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), microservices, APIs, DevOps, application security, and modern SDLC and AI-SDLC practices

Hands on leadership integrating AI/ML and GenAI capabilities into production platforms and developer workflows

Exceptional communication, influence, and executive stakeholder management skills

Preferred

Product oriented engineering leader with solid focus on platform reuse, developer experience, and AI enabled productivity

Experience leading AI first transformation initiatives, including cloud migration, platform consolidation, and intelligent automation

Proven experience deploying GenAI at scale across both customer facing and internal engineering use cases

Experience in healthcare, digital health, financial services, or similarly regulated industries

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field