Senior Cloud Data Engineer - Remote

Optum is a global organization that delivers care, aided by technology to help millions of people live healthier lives. The work you do with our team will directly improve health outcomes by connecting people with the care, pharmacy benefits, data and resources they need to feel their best. Here, you will find a culture guided by inclusion, talented peers, comprehensive benefits and career development opportunities. Come make an impact on the communities we serve as you help us advance health optimization on a global scale. Join us to start Caring. Connecting. Growing together.

The HCE Data Management team is responsible for the design, development, operation, and optimization of enterprise data platforms built on **Snowflake and Azure Cloud Services**.

As a Senior Cloud Data Engineer, you will play a key role in delivering scalable, high-performance data solutions that support analytics, AI, and business-critical workloads across the organization. This is a hands-on engineering role focused on building, optimizing, and operating cloud-native data pipelines and platforms.

You'll enjoy the flexibility to work remotely * from anywhere within the U.S. as you take on some tough challenges. For all hires in the Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. area, you will be required to work in the office a minimum of four days per week.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Design, develop, and implement scalable data solutions for complex business and technical challenges
• Build and maintain ETL/ELT pipelines integrating data across multiple enterprise systems
• Develop, test, deploy, and support high-quality data engineering solutions aligned to enterprise standards
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to support architecture, planning, and delivery of data initiatives
• Identify and drive improvements in system performance, data quality, and delivery methodologies
• Act as a technical leader and subject matter expert (SME) across development, QA, and production environments
• Mentor and guide junior engineers while promoting engineering best practices
• Support platform reliability, incident resolution, and continuous improvement initiatives

Core Technical Responsibilities

• Lead Snowflake migration and optimization efforts, including setup, data movement, and performance tuning
• Stabilize and enhance enterprise data environments (e.g., OCDUL) in collaboration with upstream and downstream teams
• Optimize Azure Databricks and Azure Data Factory pipelines for performance, scalability, and cost efficiency
• Support Azure-hosted services powering analytics and NLP workloads
• Troubleshoot complex cloud and data platform issues and implement durable, production-grade solutions
• Identify and drive cloud cost optimization opportunities across Azure and Snowflake
• Improve platform resiliency, observability, and operational maturity using cloud-native best practices

What You'll Work On

• Enterprise-scale data platforms (Snowflake, Azure)
• Data pipeline orchestration and transformation frameworks
• Analytics, reporting, and AI/NLP data enablement
• Data modeling, warehousing, and storage optimization
• Platform performance tuning, reliability engineering, and cost optimization

You'll be rewarded and recognized for your performance in an environment that will challenge you and give you clear direction on what it takes to succeed in your role as well as provide development for other roles you may be interested in.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree (or equivalent experience)
• 5+ years of experience with modern relational databases and SQL optimization
• 5+ years of experience as a Data Engineer building production data solutions
• 3+ years of experience with Azure (Data Factory, Databricks, App Services, Functions)
• 3+ years of experience with Python development
• 3+ years of experience building enterprise data solutions in cloud environments (Azure/AWS/GCP)
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with Snowflake development

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience building cloud-native web services on Azure
• Experience developing REST